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Russia of the Russians
COUNTRIES AND PEOPLES
SERIES
Each in imperial 16mo, cloth gilt,
gilt top. With about 30 full-page
plate illustrations.
Italy of the Italians.
By Helen Zimmern.
France of the French.
By E. Harrison Barker.
Switzerland of the Swiss.
By Frank Webb.
Spain of the Spanish.
By Mrs. J. Villiers-Wardell.
Germany of the Germans.
By Robert M. Berry.
Turkey of the Ottomans.
By Lucy M. J. Garnett.
Belgium of the Belgians.
By Demetrius C. Boulger.
Holland of the Dutch.
By Demetrius C. Boulger.
Japan of the Japanese.
By Prof. J. H. Longford.
Servia of the Servians.
By Chedo Mijatovich.
Austria of the Austrians and
Hungary of the Hungarians.
By L. Kellner, Paula Arnold,
and A. L. Delisle.
Greece of the Hellenes.
By Lucy M. J. Garnett.
Other Volumes in preparation
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Russia of the Russians
By
Harold Whitmore Williams, Ph.D.
London
Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1 Amen Corner, E.C.
And at Bath, New York and Melbourne
1914
Printed by Sir Isaac Pitman &
Sons, Ltd., London, Bath, New
York and Melbourne . 1914
The slow way wanders to the distant sky,
The pale sun sinks to his grey dreams of rest ;
The shadows fall, and faint the hope that I
May win the goal beyond the fading west.
But from the greyness light rose, and sweet sound
Called me to linger on the endless plain ;
Summoned swift powers from unseen heights around,
Breathed forth a home, made lone ways live again.
Sighs mount to song, light in the shadow lies,
And the wild plain is mated with the skies.
CONTENTS
ow
CHAP.
PAGE
I.
THE GROWTH OF RUSSIA ....
1
II.
THE BUREAUCRACY AND THE CONSTITUTION
. 52
III.
THE PRESS
. 99
IV.
THE INTELLIGENTSIA
. 127
V.
CHURCH AND PEOPLE
138
VI.
LITERATURE .
178
VII.
MUSIC ....
228
VIII.
THE THEATRE .
268
IX.
PAINTING ....
291
X.
ARCHITECTURE
324
XI.
PEASANTS AND PROPRIETORS
332
XII.
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
373
XIII.
IN THE CHIEF CITY
INDEX ....
389
425
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
HAULAGE ON THE VOLGA .
H.I.M. NICHOLAS II .
MOSCOW — THE KREMLIN
THE EMPRESS AND THE TSAREVICH
THE IMPERIAL DUMA
M. STOLYPIN ....
A. I. GUCHKOV
M. VLADIMIR KOKOVSTEV .
A FIFTEENTH CENTURY VILLAGE CHURCH, PAPERTNO
THE METROPOLITAN VLADIMIR OF ST. PETERSBURG
ST. JOHN BAPTIST CHURCH, UGLICH
ANTON CHEHOV
MAXIM GORKY ....
ALEXANDER BLOK
ALEKSEI REMIZOV
VILLAGERS DANCING
MODEST MUSORGSKY .
ALEXANDER SKRIABIN
M. SOBINOV ....
M. V. DAVYDOV
VERA KOMMISSARZHEVSKAIA
K. STANISLAVSKY
MICHAEL VRUBEL
ADMIRALTY ARCH, ST. PETERSBURG
PEASANTS IN THE HOME .
THE CHILDREN OF THE VILLAGE
A NORTH RUSSIAN VILLAGE
ZEMSTVO STATISTICIANS AMONG THE PEASANTRY
A RUSSIAN COUNTRY GENTLEMAN (OLD TYPE)
WOODFELLING IN A FOREST IN VOLOGDA GOVERNMENT
THE ENGLISH QUAY, ST. PETERSBURG
ST. PETERSBURG — THE NEVSKY PROSPECT
Frontispiece
6
24
48
72
76
84
96
144
154
160
186
192
212
216
230
246
260
266
270
278
286
310
330
336
338
346
352
364
374
404
418
IX
RUSSIA OF THE RUSSIANS
CHAPTER I
THE GROWTH OF RUSSIA
The fundamental difference between Russian and English
history is the difference between the great plain and the
island. English history tells of the upbuild-
lh USS M k - m * n S ky an island people of the greatest maritime
empire in the world. Russian history tells
how a people whose original home lay between the slopes of
the Carpathians and the Dnieper gradually, with toil, pain
and effort, secured possession of the greatest plain in the
world and so created the broadest of land empires. There
are curious analogies, striking points of resemblance in the
process of empire-building in both countries. But the funda-
mental difference between the island and the plain, between
a sea and a land empire makes itself constantly felt, and
largely accounts for striking differences between the two
nations in character, social structure and political development.
The island constitutes a secure physical basis for national
effort. It guarantees seclusion and privacy. It renders
intercourse with the outside world dependent far less on the
will of outsiders than on the islanders themselves. The
island nation is largely protected against outside interference.
It is in a much better position than continental nations to con-
centrate its energies on ques'ions of internal development.
Its social structure is compact and highly organised. Imperial
expansion beyond the seas does not alter the essential charac-
teristics of the structure, it only throws them into greater
relief. In thinking of the British Empire one thinks primarily
and mainly of England. In considering the Russian Empire
1
2 Russia of the Russians
one's thoughts range over a wide geographical area, and do
not readily concentrate on a given point. British expansion
is a radiation, while Russian expansion is a gradual diffusion,
And while the position of England on an island base has
made it possible to maintain a fairly constant equilibrium
between social development and internal expansion, Russian
social development has been perpetually subordinated, most
frequently sacrificed, to the inexorable necessity of extending
the political frontier further and further until the natural
barriers of sea and mountain were reached. Thus, though the
history of Russian political evolution runs almost parallel
with that of the British Empire, England has enjoyed a large
measure of political liberty for centuries, while Russia is only
now making her first experiments in constitutional govern-
ment, and Russian backwardness in the matter of political
institutions and social initiative is largely to be accounted
for by the position of the Russian people on the great plain.
The plain that constitutes the arena of Russian historical
effort extends from the Baltic and the Prussian and Austrian
frontiers across Eastern Europe and Western Asia in one
vast sweep, broken only by the low range of the Urals. It
is bounded on the North by the White Sea and the Arctic
Ocean, on the South by the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the
Kopet Dagh range on the Persian frontier, and on the East
reaches a limit in the Pamirs, the Tian-Shan and Altai ranges
and the mountainous region beyond the Yenisei. The plain
is not absolutely level. There are hills, undulations, stretches
of broken country. A map indicating altitude above sea-
level displays in different regions of Russia various shades,
but these shades will all be of the same colour. No point
in the plain has an altitude of more than 1,400 feet. The
Russian landscape gives the impression of boundless space ;
it constantly beckons, as the sea does, to far horizons, only
that the soil again and again tempts to linger, to settle and
to build. The spirit that sent Vikings and Englishmen roving
across the green expanse of the sea has caused scores of peoples
The Growth of Russia 3
to go wandering over the plain. But in the end they turned
their tents into huts ; they naturally inclined to settle along
the great avenues of communication, on the banks of the
rivers that thread their way through swamp, forest and
steppe to the limiting seas.
There are in European Russia three great highway-rivers,
the "Volga, the Dnieper and the Western Dvina. They take
their rise in the marshy region of Central
Three River Russia to the North- West of Moscow, and
Highways. .
now long slow versts across the plain, the
first to the Caspian, the second to the Black Sea, and the
third to the Baltic. The course of these rivers indicates the
chief lines .of human intercourse, those great trade routes
that give the principal stimulus to social development and
to the organisation and growth of political communities on
the plain. The limitless expanse is a constant appeal to go
on somewhither, it awakens a spirit of restless adventure.
But it is the rivers that tell whither to go and why, and the
rivers that take their winding course across European Russia
constitute a highway between North-Western Europe and
the Caspian and the Middle East, and again between North-
Western Europe and the Black Sea basin and Constantinople,
that is to say, the Near East. There are no high watersheds
between the rivers. Frequently two basins are separated
by only a few miles of gently undulating country, and boats
can easily be conveyed from one to the other overland. These
great waterways are thus open roads across the Continent,
and those who live along the banks of the rivers necessarily
become intermediaries between East and West.
In winter the rivers are frozen hard, and the plain in all
its vast extent from Odessa to Archangel, and from the Pamirs
to the Baltic, is covered with a sheet of snow. Winter does
not paralyse human effort on the plain, but circumscribes it,
concentrates it within definite limits. Summer is the time
for roving, for active intercourse with the wide world, in the
form of trading or military expeditions. Winter encourages
4 Russia of the Russians
settlement, the accumulation of the products of the summer's
toil, indoor life, home industries, communal organisation,
the growth of villages and towns. Winter is the period of
repose for nature and men, and it is the repose of winter that
makes the activity of the summer possible. Then the long
winter has a profound effect on character. It causes a relaxa-
tion of effort, leads to apathy and inertness, and in any case
necessitates a complete change of occupation. To till the
soil is out of the question while the snow lies on the ground.
The place of agriculture is taken by forestry, by hunting,
or by home industries. The melting in spring of the snows
that cover the greater part of two continents fertilises the soil,
fills the rivers to overflowing with water, and provokes a
sudden exuberant uprush of vegetation. Agriculture and
commerce on the plain are dependent on the sharp contrast
between winter and summer.
It is this natural environment — so different from the snug
compactness of an island with an even temperate climate —
that determines the main lines of Russian historical develop-
ment. The thousand odd years of Russian history show
how a people living on the South-West corner of the plain
learned the plain's secret, discovered its rhythm, its steady
alternation between relaxation and effort, between movement
and repose, gradually secured possession of the overland
trade-routes and, step by step, transforming commercial
advantage into political power, finally subdued all its rivals
and created an Empire whose limits are nearly everywhere
coterminous with those of the plain, while in the Caucasus
and Siberia they overpass them.
For several centuries before the beginnings of Russian
history, the Southern Steppes of Russia were occupied by
Scythians and Sarmatians, of the life and
Early History, habits of the former of whom Herodotus
has left a vivid account. Greek colonies
occupied various points along the shores of the Black Sea,
and excavations on the sites of these colonies have yielded
The Growth of Russia 5
rich treasure, a large proportion of which now adorns
Russian museums, and serves to show how strongly beat
the pulse of Greek civilisation even in the Euxine region
on the confines of the kingdoms of the barbarians. The
Sarmatians were probably of Iranian stock, and a remnant
of their descendants is to be found in the Ossetines in the
Northern Caucasus. Who the Scythians were is not very
clear. Perhaps they were in the main Iranian, and perhaps
there were Slav tribes among those whom the Greek writers
included under the general designation. That Slavs and
Iranians were at one time in close contact is clear from
linguistic evidence. The centre of the original home of the
Slavs was in the marshy basin of the Pripet in the south of
the present Government of Minsk, and probably the White
Russians who inhabit Minsk and the neighbouring Govern-
ments more nearly represent the original Slavonic type than
any other people. To the north of the Scythians in the forest
region bordering on the steppe were Finnish tribes — the
Western Finns, whose modern representatives are the natives
of Finland and Esthonia, being gradually driven northward
by the movements of Germanic and Slavonic peoples. The
Goths came down from the north before the Christian era,
occupied for a time the basin of the Vistula, moved southward
to the Danube and in the third century a.d. held sway in the
West of the steppes.
Russian history begins with the creation in the ninth
century of the State of Kiev. Up till then the Slav tribes,
settled along the upper reaches of the Dnieper
Kiev. and its tributaries and along the banks of
other rivers as far north as Lake Ilmen, had
not reached the stage of organised political life, although
here and there they seem to have erected forts and even towns.
Their position on the trade route between the Baltic and
the Black Sea gave them certain advantages as intermediaries,
but also exposed them to attack. In the ninth century about
the time when King Alfred was engaged in his struggle with
6 Russia of the Russians
the Danes, Germanic freebooters known as Variags or Var-
engers captured the Slav town of Kiev. It is not absolutely
certain who these Variags were. They may possibly have
been Gothic pirates from settlements on the Black Sea coast
— remnants of the Gothic State in the Southern steppes which
had been broken up by the Hunns. But it is more probable
that the invaders were Northmen who had penetrated into
the interior from the Baltic by way of the Neva, Lake Ladoga,
the river Volkhovo, Novgorod, Lake Ilmen and the rivers
leading thence to the tributaries of the Dnieper. These
bands of adventurers led, as the annals say, by a chief named
Rurik, subjugated the dwellers along the river banks, and
seizing Kiev, which, owing to its position at the confluence of
several rivers, was an important trading and political centre,
made the first attempt to weld these scattered Slav tribes
into a political whole. The Variags, or as they were also called,
Rus or Russians, made plundering excursions across the
Eastern steppes by way of the kingdom of the Khazars — a
Turkish people whose rulers had adopted Judaism — to the
Caspian and to Northern Persia, and also down the Dnieper
and across the Black Sea to the very walls of Constantinople.
The rule of the Variags was hard, but it benefited the Slavs.
It established order, promoted trade, and provided protection
against the attacks of the nomad hordes who were constantly
making their way from Asia into the rich pastures of the
steppes. And the Variags very soon ceased to be foreigners
and became Slavs in speech and habits. The early rulers
of the Kiev state, Rurik's successors, the Princes Oleg,
Igor and Sviatoslav and the Princess Olga, made the neigh-
bouring Slav tribes groan by their forcible extortion of tribute,
but at the same time Olga, for instance, defended Kiev against
the Khazars and Sviatoslav and his successors against another
Turkish people called the Pechenegs, known in Byzantine
history as Patzinaks, while during the eleventh and twelfth
centuries the energies of the princes of Kiev were engaged
in warding off the attacks of the Torks and Polovians, also
H.I.M. NICHOLAS II
[In the uniform of an English Admiral)
The Growth of Russia 7
Turkish peoples, a section of whom finally settled in central
Hungary.
Christianity was adopted in 988 as the State religion by
Prince Vladimir, the son of Sviatoslav. The missionaries
came from Constantinople, with which the
Christianity Russians had for a considerable time pre-
viously maintained commercial and political
relations. Russian marauders had more than once ravaged
the precincts of the Great City. Uncouth Russian envoys
had frequently stood side by side with the envoys of other
barbarian peoples of the steppes, with Khazars and Pechenegs,
shy and overawed amidst the dazzling splendours of the
Imperial Court. Princess Olga had visited the city during
the reign of Constantine Porphyrogenitos, and had concluded
with the Greeks commercial treaties. Sviatoslav, Vladimir's
father, had, at the instigation of the Greeks, invaded Bulgaria
at the head of an army of 60,000 men, and had crossed the
Balkans into Thrace. But the Greeks turned against him,
and he was in the end defeated by the Emperor John
Tzimiskes on the Danube. The city constantly attracted
the Russians ; they coveted it, and the Balkan question, the
question of the watch and ward over the straits on which
Constantinople stands, the straits that lead out into the
Mediterranean and the wide world beyond, has been vital
for Russia from the very earliest period of her history.
The step taken by Vladimir in adopting Christianity as
the State religion had consequences of immense importance.
Byzantine culture had a powerful rival in that Perso-Arabic
civilisation, which had its centre at Bagdad, and held sway
over Mesopotamia and the Middle East. The Arabs took a
considerable share in the trade of the great plain, and in this
way maintained intercourse with the Russians. It is not
improbable that, as a legend indicates, Vladimir may have
weighed in his mind the possibility of adopting Islam as a
symbol of civilisation and political progress, just as the rulers
of the Khazars from similar motives had adopted Judaism.
2 (24OO)
8 Russia of the Russians
But Vladimir chose Christianity, and so set his face westward
and linked the fortunes of the Russian State with those
great forces and tendencies which have produced modern
civilisation.
The adoption of Christianity was of great immediate
importance for the Russian State. It strengthened the
monarchical principle and led to the introduction of Byzantine
book-learning and Byzantine administrative methods.
Vladimir was an ardent promoter of learning and the arts,
he succeeded in throwing a poetical glamour over the con-
ception of the state, and in the hold he gained on the popular
imagination — the folk-songs are full of the praise of Vladimir,
the " Bright Sun " — he may very well be compared with
Alfred.
But the new social and political ideas introduced from
Byzantium were subjected to severe stress and strain, were
scattered by violent winds of misfortune across the plain,
and took centuries to mature and to become embodied in a
powerful State. The territory inhabited by those Slav tribes,
who acknowledged more or less effectively the sovereign
rights of Vladimir and his descendants, extended over the
northern fringe of the steppe region as far as the Western
Bug and the Dnieper on the West ; and on the East as far
as the upper reaches of the Don. To the north, in the forest
region, it extended beyond Lake Ladoga, and here again on
the west it was bounded by an irregular line running from
about where Dorpat now stands to the neighbourhood of
Vilna, and on the east it extended as far as Nizhni-Novgorod
at the junction of the Oka and the Volga. But nominal
extent of territory was by no means coincident with extent
of power. Rivalries between various regions and princes
weakened the central authority, and the practice of dividing
up territory among members of the princely house of Rurik
led to constant bickering and feuds. Custom had established
that the senior member of the family should occupy the
throne of Kiev, the other principalities going to the other
The Growth of Russia 9
members of the house of Rurik in order of age. But the
senior might be passed over in favour of the ablest, and, in
an age when firmness of will and strength of arm were the
first requisites in a ruler, might very easily have supplanted
complicated and cumbrous right and made confusion worse
confounded. The various appanages of the descendants of
Vladimir became small and practically independent princi-
palities, and the strength of the ' Russian Land " was
frittered away in petty dynastic conflicts. It became
increasingly difficult to offer an effective resistance to the
incursions of the nomads who occupied the Southern and
Eastern steppes. The political power of Kiev steadily
declined. Novgorod and Pskov in the north were practically
independent merchant republics. In the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries the Galicio-Volhynian principality in
the west displayed a tendency to assume the power that
Kiev was letting fall from her hands. The constant pressure
of the nomads on the fringe of the steppe region stimulated
a colonising movement to the North-East, to the region
between the Volga and the Oka, where the Slavs mingled with
the Finns, forming a new type known as the Great Russian.
The princes of this region grew more powerful in proportion
as the prestige of Kiev declined, and when Kiev fell the
strongest ruler of the North-East, the Grand Prince of Vladimir
on the Kliazma, became the overlord of the Russian princes.
The Kiev period, which lasted from the end of the ninth
to the beginning of the thirteenth century, may be regarded
as a preliminary survey of the field of Russian historical
effort, a kind of feeling of the ground, the drafting of a rough
sketch or plan. It was a period of happy guesses, of brilliant
suggestions. The spirit of the plain was in it, the spirit of
expansion and heroic adventure. For the Russian of the
Kiev period the world was wide and full of wonder, and the
tasks it presented were of fascinating variety. The political
and social system was ill organised and loosely developed.
In the towns the merchant class was dominant, the Prince
10 Russia of the Russians
and his personal followers, his band or druzhina, maintained
order, and only gradually transformed their military energy
into political power. The clan system prevailed, the blood-
feud was common, slavery existed but in a comparatively
mild form. Popular assemblies, in which the heads of the
clans took part, largely controlled the administration.
But within this loose and primitive social and political
organisation the elements of a higher order were actively
present. Christianity not only reformed manners and pro-
moted learning, it brought with it from Byzantium legislative
and administrative conceptions which became powerful
motive forces in Russian history. By asserting the principle
of the sanctity of monarchical authority it greatly increased
the prestige and the power of the princes. And by marking
off the Russians from their neighbours as a distinctly Christian
people it strengthened and deepened national feeling. The
Orthodox Christianity of Byzantium assumed under Yaroslav,
the son of Vladimir, a specifically Russian character. Christian
doctrine, Christian tradition, were not merely translated from
Greek into Slavonic, they became the predominant, the vital
and the distinctive elements in a rich world of popular belief.
But they were modified in the process, they became Russian.
Christian sentiment reinforced national sentiment. To be
a Russian meant to be a Christian, and the struggle for national
existence against pagan or Mohammedan neighbours received
a religious sanction. Christianity was an important element
in that conception of the fundamental unity of the different
sections of the Russian people, which steadily grew and
developed in spite of fierce attacks from without, and even
more dangerous internecine strife. This sense of national
unity, powerful as it was in the Kiev Period, did not then
avail to establish an effective and unitary political organisation.
It bore its fruits only in the Moscow Period.
In the Kiev Period, too, the Russians realised something
of the extent of the world in which they were to play their
part. They maintained constant intercourse with Byzantium,
The Growth of Russia 11
which was a meeting-place for representatives of all parts
of the civilised world. The most westerly of the Russian
principalities of this period, Galich, at one time extended as
far as the mouth of the Danube, and its chief connections
were with a semi-barbarous Hungary and with the Slav states
of Bohemia and Poland on the north and north-west.
Yaroslav the Great, the son of Vladimir, in whose reign the
Kiev state reached the zenith of its power, married a Swedish
princess and Scandinavians were prominent at his court.
His sister was married to Casimir, King of Poland, one of
his daughters to Henry I of France, and another to King
Andrew of Hungary, and there is also mention of a connection
by marriage between Yaroslav and English princes. On
the west the Russians had to deal with Lithuanians, on the
north and north-east with Finnish tribes, and in the south
and south-east with nomads of Turkish race. From the
latter the Russians borrowed many customs and shared with
them certain traits such as a passionate love of the steppes.
Vladimir is frequently spoken of in song and story as a Kogan
or Khagan, which is the distinctive title of Turkish ruling
princes from the Black Sea to the Mongolian frontier of
China. The roving warriors or bogatyrs of the Russian
epos bear in many respects a striking resemblance to the
typical nomad warrior, and the name itself comes from the
Persian bahadur through Turkish. Farther to the east,
beyond the steppes and the Caspian, there was the wealthy
and prosperous sphere of Persian civilisation, with which
the Russians maintained trading relations through the
Bulgarians of the Volga and the peoples of the steppes. The
unknown author of the great heroic poem, " The Story of
Igor's Band," a moving account of the expedition of a Russian
prince against the Polovians — the only fragment of secular
literature that has been handed down from the Kiev Period, —
was probably the contemporary of such Persian poets as
Khakani and Nizami. Tn the Caucasus there was the
picturesque kingdom of Georgia, which in the twelfth century
12 Russia of the Russians
attained brilliance and power. Towards the close of the Kiev
Period Byzantium still retained its hold on the southern coast
of the Black Sea, but Turkish nomads wandered across the
uplands of Asia Minor, and the Seljuks had founded, in the
eleventh century, that state of Konia or Ikonium which
was later to serve as a base for the Ottoman advance. In
the north-west of the Russian territory Novgorod and Pskov
maintained active intercourse with the rising cities of Northern
Germany. It was indeed a rich and varied world with which
the Russians of the Kiev Period were at various points brought
into contact, the world of the early middle ages with a flourish-
ing Islam, a slowly expiring Byzantium, and a Europe just
coming into being.
In 1238, 1239, and 1240 the North-Eastern and Southern
Russian principalities were overrun by an army of Tartars
or Turks under Mongol leadership. The
The Tartars, impact of this invasion was far more terrible
than that of the incursions of Turkish nomads
— Khazars, Pecheniegs and Polovians — from which the
Russians had suffered for centuries. The Tartars formed
part of the host organised in Central Asia by Chingiz Khan,
who had discovered in carefully planned and rapidly multiplied
nomad raids a secret of world-wide conquest. After having
devastated the greater part of Russian territory and ravaged
Poland, Hungary, Bosnia and Dalmatia, the Tartar armies,
known under the general name of the Golden Horde, settled
in the South-Eastern steppes, and their leader Baty, the
grandson of Chingiz, built a capital at Sarai on the Volga,
some distance to the north of the present Astrakhan, whence
he exercised rule over the dominions allotted to him, Khiva,
the Urals, the Crimea and the Russian principalities. The
rule of the Tartar Khans over Russia took the form of the
exaction of tribute, which was either collected by special
tax-gatherers called baskaks, usually in a very brutal and
rough-and-ready fashion, or else brought by the princes in
person to the Horde. The Khans skilfully took advantage
The Growth of Russia 13
of dissensions among the Russian princes in order to con-
solidate their own power in Russia, and, on the other hand,
rival Russian princes constantly sought to secure their ends
by intriguing at the Khan's court. Several princes were
cruelly murdered in the Horde, and Yaroslav II, who was
Grand Prince of Vladimir at the time of the Tartar invasion,
was poisoned on his return journey from Karakorum, the
capital of the Great Khan in Mongolia. The Khans interfered
little, however, in the details of the administration of
Russian principalities, and there was a great deal of peaceful
intercourse between Tartars and Russians. Sarai was an
important commercial centre, owing to its position on
the chief caravan route between Russia and India. There
was a considerable colony of Russian traders in the city.
Christianity was tolerated, and occasionally members of the
Khan's family professed Christianity, although the bulk of
the Tartars nominally abandoned Shamanism for Islam
shortly after their settlement in the steppe The Tartars
passed on to the Russians many elements of Chinese and Persian
culture and certain Oriental administrative conceptions.
The Russian vocabulary contains a considerable number of
words borrowed from the Tartar language, and many of
these were borrowed by the Tartars in their turn from
Chinese, Persian or Arabic. It was as a result of Tartar
influence that the domestic life of the Russian well-to-do
classes assumed that predominantly Oriental character which
was so marked a feature of the Moscow Period. On the
whole, in spite of the brutality and ferocity frequently
displayed by the Tartar Khans and their tax-gatherers, and
in spite of the fact that the effect of the invasion was to
transfer the political centre of Russia to a region remote from
the civilisation of the South and the West, Tartar rule did
contribute in many ways to the enrichment of Russian
civilisation. Negatively the Tartar yoke provided a most
effective stimulus to Russian political development. Just
as the raids of the sea-rovers, the Danes, led to the creation
14 Russia of the Russians
of a United England, so the invasion of those land-rovers,
the Tartars, set in motion the forces which gradually brought
about the political union of the scattered forces of the Russian
people.
After the fall of Kiev, in 1240, the greater part of the South
Russian territory passed under the direct rule of the Tartars.
In the West, the Principality of Galicia and Volhynia served
for a time as the rallying ground for the remnants of Southern
Russian power, until towards the end of the fourteenth
century Galicia was incorporated in Poland, and Volhynia
was annexed to Lithuania. Most of the other Eastern and
South-Western Russian principalities were absorbed in that
Lithuanian State which had grown strong through perpetual
conflict with the Teutonic order in East Prussia on the one
hand, and, on the other, through the subjection of petty Russian
princes, weakened by endless dynastic strife. In the long-
run the Lithuanian elements in the Lithuanian State were
completely overshadowed by the Russian, constituting about
nine-tenths of the population and territory, and the union of
this predominantly Russian and Orthodox State with Roman
Catholic Poland through the marriage of its Grand Prince
Jagailo with Jadwiga, the Queen of Poland, in 1386, proved
to be a source of constant internal dissension, and a perpetual
occasion of conflict with the growing Russian power in the
North-East. It was in the North-East, in that region between
the Oka and the Volga, where Russian colonists mingling
with Finnish natives had founded new homes amidst the
forests, that the promise implied in the Kiev State again took
its slow and toilsome way towards fulfilment. The practice
of constant subdivision into appanages was in force here as
it was throughout the whole of the territory reigned over by
princes of the House of Rurik, and also — though counter-
acted to a greater extent by centralising tendencies — in the
neighbouring States of Lithuania and Poland. Among the
petty princes of the region, those of Vladimir on the Kliazma,
a tributary of the Oka, gained the ascendancy. In 1169
The Growth of Russia 15
Andrei Bogoliubski, Prince of Vladimir, assumed the title
of Grand Prince, thereby asserting against the rulers of
Kiev his claim to the headship over all the Russian land.
But the headship of the Vladimir Princes was for a long time
merely nominal. Their real authority extended little beyond
the principalities in their immediate neighbourhood, Riazan
and Murom. Their attempts to control the affairs of the
South Russian principalities or those of Novgorod and Pskov
were rarely successful. Livonian knights and Lithuanians
had much more influence in the West of Russia, and Poles
Lithuanians and Hungarians in the enfeebled South, than
did the Princes of Vladimir during the twelfth century.
Vladimir must have been an important trading centre, lying
as it does between the Oka and the Volga. In grave mounds
in the region have been found coins pointing to intercourse
with the distant East and the distant West, coins of Arab
Caliphs and Bukharan Samanids dating from 772 to 984, and
Anglo-Saxon coins and coins of the German Empire dating
from 950 to 1090. From the twelfth to the fourteenth cen-
tury, Vladimir, with the neighbouring principalities of Rostov
and Suzdal, was a home of refuge for that slowly developing
Russian culture which, in other parts of the Russian land,
was exposed to a constant irruption of alien influences. Some
of the best monuments of Russian ecclesiastical architecture
are to be found in the Vladimir-Suzdal country, and here
the Russian spirit ripened and gathered strength in
undistinguished obscurity.
It was after the Tartar invasion, in the course of which
Vladimir was sacked like many other Russian towns, that
the title of Grand Prince of Vladimir came
Vladimir. to connote a real authority over the whole
of the North and North-East of Russia.
But this was because the Grand Prince became the deputy
of the Khan, and was responsible before him for the collection
of tribute from the other princes. He was the chief vassal,
and his power was a derivative power. But it was none
16 Russia of the Russians
the less real, and was much more effective as a means of
asserting headship than the earlier attempts of the Vladimir
rulers to enforce their shadowy claims. And for this reason
the title was an object of perpetual intrigue in the Horde
on the part of rival princes. Tartar rule served as a
mould for Russian unity. It counteracted the perpetual
tendency to dismemberment, induced by the practice of
dividing and subdividing appanages, until the very principle
of authority went astray in fragmentary baronies in the
forests.
The process of reunion was hastened by the rapid economic
growth of the principality of Moscow, an appanage of Vladimir,
which was formed in the thirteenth century, and by reason
of the fertility of its soil and its advantageous position on
the trade routes between the Volga and the Western Dvina
and Novgorod and Riazan attracted a large population from
the neighbouring principalities. Moscow proved much better
adapted than Vladimir to be the economic centre of the
North-East , and it was mainly for this reason that the political
supremacy gradually passed into its hands. The princes of
Moscow gradually increased their territory by carefully
calculated purchase and conquest, and a particularly shrewd
and enterprising ruler, Ivan Kalita, secured, in 1328, from
the Khan by the customary methods of intrigue and the
murder of rivals the title of Grand Prince, which thereafter
was a permanent attribute of the rulers of Moscow. Ivan
Kalita, as his nickname " Moneybags " indicates, was a
careful householder, and his will with its precise enumeration
of the golden dishes in his possession is more like that of a
country squire than a monarch. He built churches in Moscow,
transferred the Metropolitan of Vladimir to his capital,
established order in his dominions, intrigued right and left,
added field to field and town to town, used the troops of the
Khan against his neighbours and kinsmen, and altogether
prospered ingloriously, but in a way that surely tended to
the centralisation of political power in Moscow. His
The Growth of Russia 17
successors followed in his footsteps, and the chief characteristic
of the rulers of Moscow down to the time of Ivan the
Terrible, and even after his day, was a sober thriftiness,
crafty forethought, a minute choice of ways and means
and an unwillingness to undertake any risks. They were
cautious business men. They increased their territory by
purchase, by gradually modifying the laws of inheritance
so as to prevent the dissipation of territory in appanages, by
setting their neighbours quarrelling amongst themselves,
by fomenting civil strife in other principalities, and by going
out to conquest when conquest was sure. Very striking is
the contrast between this policy and the generous and reckless
expansiveness of the Kiev Period, the spirit which later
became embodied in the Cossacks. If the Kiev policy was
that of the open steppe, the Moscow policy was that of the
forest region, where an enemy may be lurking behind every
tree. Both tendencies, that of the bogatyr or roving hero, and
that of the diak or intriguing and calculating Government
clerk, have continually played and still play their part in
the development of the Russian nation and the Russian
character.
While Moscow grew stronger, the power of the Golden Horde
steadily declined. Internal dissensions and conflicts with
Central Asian States undermined the authority of the Khans.
But the Tartars for a long time remained capable of doing
a considerable amount of harm. In the period from the
middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the fifteenth century
the Khans made seven destructive raids on Russian territory.
One Khan, Mamai, was defeated at Kulikovo, on the Don,
in 1380, by Prince Dmitri Donskoi, who displayed a personal
courage not usual among the Moscow rulers. Tokhtamysh
sacked the Kremlin, the great Tamerlane himself devastated
Riazan, and both the Khans Yedigei and Ulu Mahmed fell
upon Moscow. But in spite of these marauding expeditions
the authority of the Khans became a negligible quantity
for the Moscow Princes, and Ivan III found it in 1480 a simple
18 Russia of the Russians
matter to throw off that Tartar yoke to which the Russian
people had been subject for 240 years.
Ivan III attained remarkable success in pursuing the aim
of his dynasty to reunite the Russian people under the rule
of Moscow. First of all he destroyed the
Ivan III. independence of the proud merchant republic
of Novgorod. Taking advantage of the fact
that the people of Novgorod, dreading the growing power
of Moscow, had invited a Lithuanian prince to occupy the
traditional position of nominal ruler in the city, Ivan sent a
force against the Novgorodians, who were left in the lurch
by the Lithuanians to whom they had appealed, and defeated
on the river Shelon near Lake Ilmen. Then Ivan gradually
reduced the privileges of the republic, and appearing before
the city with a strong army enforced from it absolute sub-
mission. He abolished the system of government by popular
vote, and by wholesale execution of the leading citizens and
the transference of a large number of Novgorod families to
Moscow territory, he precluded a revival of autonomous
tendencies, and so closed one of the most picturesque pages
in Russian history. Situated on the river Volkhovo, at the
point where it flows out of Lake Ilmen on its way to Lake
Ladoga, the Neva and the Baltic, Novgorod held the key
of the trade between the interior of Russia and the Germanic
countries of the North, it commanded the chief overland
route between the Baltic and the Black Sea. It was constantly
visited by foreign traders who were subjected to special laws
and regulations, and had a quarter of their own in the city
known as the German quarter. In the course of time the
dominions of Novgorod came to extend as far East as the
Urals, and to an indefinite distance northward. A prince of
the line of Rurik always resided in the city, but the real
power lay in the hands of the popular assembly or vieche,
which was summoned at need in the public square by the
ringing of a bell, and which elected an executive from among
members of the powerful merchant families. Novgorod,
The Growth of Russia 19
on account of its wealth, was an important centre of culture,
which had a predominantly ecclesiastical character, and
found expression in the building of a large number of churches
and monasteries, many of which are still standing. But
there was a rich, many-coloured and turbulent secular life,
echoes of which have been handed down in the epic folk-songs
or byline.
The principality of Tver, near Moscow, shared the fate of
Novgorod, and Ivan III united the whole of Northern and
North-Eastern Russia under his rule. There were other
circumstances that conspired to strengthen the monarchical
idea in Moscow. The fall of Constantinople, the seizure by
Mohammedans of the Second Rome, the centre of Orthodox
Christendom, produced a profound impression upon the
Russian mind. The marriage of Ivan III with Zoe Paleologa
brought the ruler of Moscow into direct connection with the
house of that young Emperor, who had died bravely fighting
on the walls of Constantinople, and the idea that Moscow
had inherited the mission of Byzantium, — was, in fact, the
" Third Rome," — was eagerly adopted by the Moscow court,
and developed by Russian ecclesiastics. In 1492 the Lithu-
anian Prince Alexander formally recognised Ivan III as
" Monarch of all Russia."
The new State was confronted with grave problems. Its
position at the very centre of the great plain made territorial
expansion a necessity of existence. There were enemies on
every hand, and there was constant need to be armed for
defence and attack. The whole organisation of the State —
and this is characteristic of Russian policy till the beginning
of the nineteenth century — was subordinated to military
ends. Moscow had not had time to develop its resources,
to attain to any high degree of material prosperity and social
well-being before it was plunged into the turmoil of incessant
and exhausting wars. Civilisation and manhood suffered
terribly, but there was a steady and inexorable growth of
power. In the midst of the plain, on the frontiers of Asia,
20 Russia of the Russians
far from the vitalising currents of Western intellectual con-
flict and development, State power conceived of as autocracy
acquired a dominance over the individual that can hardly
be matched in Byzantium. Nowhere is the problem of a
conflict between personality and power presented with such
force and acuteness as in Russia.
The first task of the Muscovite Princes was to deal with
the Tartars in the East and South-East. The Horde had
split up into three distinct Khanates, those of Kazan, Astra-
khan, and the Crimea, and, by playing off the Khanates one
against the other, Ivan III and his successors sought finally
to break the Tartar power. Kazan was easily subdued, but
the struggle was complicated by the constant intervention
of the Crimean Khan, who now had powerful support in the
person of a Turkish overlord in Constantinople. There were
eighty years of raids and counter raids. The grandson of
Ivan III, Ivan IV, the Terrible, who came to the throne in
1533, and who was the most striking contemporary of Eliza-
beth, took Kazan with its territory in 1551 and Astrakhan in
1556. In view of the raids of the Crimean Khan he was
compelled to establish fortified outposts on the Steppe, thus
preparing the way for the reconquest of the South. The new
dominions speedily became an integral part of the Tsardom.
Russian colonists settled among the Tartars in the Kazan
region. Tartar princes and nobles came to the court of the
Tsar and became, like the descendants of once independent
Russian princes, members of the Russian aristocracy. The
names of many Russian noble families, such as Urusov and
Bakhmetiev, point to their Tartar origin. The Crimea stood
as a constant reminder of the sovereignty of the Ottoman
Turks over the Black Sea basin and the Southern steppe.
Ivan's advisers submitted to him a plan for the conquest of
the Crimea, but he was compelled to leave its execution to a
future generation, just as he was compelled to leave to a later
day the realisation of his dream of establishing the Muscovite
power on the shores of the Baltic.
The Growth of Russia 21
The Eastern frontier was further extended during the reign
of Ivan the Terrible by a band of Cossack adventurers under
Yermak, who defeated the Tartar Khan of
Eastern Western Siberia, and made the Tsar a present
Extension. . . r
of the territory in the basm of the Tobol and
the Irtish. But the task of extending and strengthening
the Eastern frontier was simplicity itself, compared with
that of coping with more civilised Western rivals. Poland
united with Lithuania had become, under the strong rule of
the Jagailo dynasty, a great power. A conflict with Moscow
in which Lithuania had become involved during the reign of
Ivan III had served as a warning against the danger of separa-
tist tendencies, and the union with Poland had become closer
in consequence. After the final subjection of the Teutonic
Order in Eastern Prussia by Casimir IV in 1466, and the
assertion of Polish supremacy at the mouth of the Danube
by the same King, the power of the Polish-Lithuanian State
extended from the Baltic at the mouth of the Vistula to the
Black Sea. The Polish cities were prosperous, the Polish
upper classes were sensitive to the influences of European
civilisation, the Roman Catholic Church, which was dominant
in Poland, helped to maintain constant intercourse with the
West, and at one time it seemed possible that this central
European State might attain something like permanent
greatness. But there were sources of internal weakness
which even the prudence and firmness of her ablest rulers
could not wholly counteract. The king was dependent on a
diet composed of representatives of the nobility and gentry,
who cared more for their own class and personal interests
than the general interests of the State or the welfare of the
common people. The presence in the diet of powerful mag-
nates from Lithuania, frequently inheritors of Russian or
Lithuanian appanages, introduced a further element of dissen-
sion and confusion. The distinction between Lithuania
and Poland made itself constantly felt, more especially on
religious grounds. Poland was aggressively Roman Catholic,
22 Russia of the Russians
while in Lithuania only the Lithuanians in the north, who
formed a small minority of the population, were Catholics,
the bulk of the population being Russians and Orthodox.
The Reformation, which influenced the upper classes in both
Lithuania and Poland, temporarily checked this antagonism,
but with the triumph of the counter-reformation in Poland
it revived with new vigour. Over the western steppe roved
bands of freebooters known as Cossacks, who were mostly
Russian in language and Orthodox as to faith, and yielded
little more than a nominal submission to Polish authority.
Poland formed the chief barrier to Muscovite expansion
on the West. The Baltic coast was held by the Livonian
knights, and Sweden, a growing power in
Westem^tete^ the north ' 0CCU P ied Finland. The second
half of the reign of Ivan the Terrible was
mainly absorbed in a conflict with these three powers. The
immediate result of a war which Ivan undertook with the
Livonian Order and in which Sweden, Denmark, and Poland
intervened, was that the Order fell to pieces and its territory
was divided, the southern half falling to Poland, and the
northern half to Sweden. The Muscovite State became
involved in long and exhausting wars with Poland and Sweden,
from which it drew no direct profit. Both these Western
powers were bent on preventing such intercourse between
Moscow and Western Europe as might have a civilising effect
on the Russians, and so increase their political power. Ivan
died in 1584, embittered by the failure of his western campaigns.
But his reign had been in every way one of immense impor-
tance for the Muscovite State. He was left an orphan at
the age of three, and grew up uncared for, unwatched, while
the boyars or great nobles intrigued, fought and robbed around
him. He learned to detest the boyars, and when he came
to manhood did his utmost to break their power, invoking
against them the support of the populace, and surrounding
himself with a terrible guard called the oprichina, who
murdered indiscriminately all who were supposed to be his
The Growth of Russia 23
enemies. His chief advisers during the early part of his
reign were not boyars, but the priest Sylvester, and an official
of humble origin named Adashev. Immediately after his
coronation he convened a National Assembly, which con-
firmed a revised judicial code, and heard from the young
Tsar's own lips his bitter complaints against the boyars
and his promise of good government in the future. Certain
administrative reforms were, as a matter of fact, undertaken.
The task of maintaining order in the provinces was taken
from the boyar governors and laid on elders chosen by the
population. The practice of collecting taxes by farming
out whole districts to governors who " fed " on them, as
the expression was, was abandoned in favour of a system of
collecting through elected representatives of the people,
all the members of which became jointly responsible to the
Government. The effect of these measures was not to
develop the principle of popular liberty. Rather the reverse.
The power of the boyars was limited, but at the same time
the masses of the people were attached more directly to the
central Government, and the authority of the Tsar was
increased. The chief object of these and similar measures
was in fact to increase the fiscal resources of the State in view
of multiplying military needs. Ivan's own character was
fiercely despotic. He was subject to fits of ungovernable
passion, under the influence of which he committed acts of
cruelty incomprehensible in a sane man. He murdered his
eldest son with his own hand. He slaughtered the citizens
of Novgorod without cause. He ravaged his own country
and murdered his own subjects by the hundred. His fits
of passion were succeeded by long periods of remorse, and
he ended his life as a monk, varying his monastic exercises
with coarse revelry. But he was a statesman of remarkable
talent. He clearly foresaw the natural course of Russian
political development, and the work of expansion westward
begun by him was consistently carried on by his successors
until its completion by Peter the Great.
3— (2400)
24 Russia of the Russians
The personal character of Ivan the Terrible and his admin-
istrative reforms strengthened a distinctively Muscovite,
singularly gaunt and merciless conception
M R S uk Vite of the State - The idea of a P olitical unit Y.
permitting of no diversity, was carried to an
extreme. The tillers of the soil, the peasantry, had in the
course of centuries sunk into a position of absolute economic
dependence on the landowners. Towards the close of the
sixteenth century they were finally attached to the soil and
became serfs, one of the chief objects of this measure being
to ensure a regular payment of taxes. The oppressive
character of the Moscow system led to a constant emigration
of the more adventurous elements to the thinly-populated
regions beyond the frontier. Many of them settled in the
steppes on the Don, and others went Eastwards to Siberia.
These rovers, like those in the steppes beyond the Dnieper,
were called Cossacks, and they were the chief agents of Russian
expansion eastwards.
Muscovite rule was hard. But Moscow, the capital, lived
a very picturesque and many-sided life, with a great variety
of interests of its own. The city was an exceedingly impor-
tant trading centre. It traded with Persia and Central Asia
by way of the Volga and Astrakhan, and the chief inter-
mediaries in the Persian trade were then, as later, Armenians.
The Moscow Tsars tried to open up trade with India, and
though the difficulties were not insuperable — an inquiry showed
that it was a matter of only four months' journey from the
Caspian to the Moghul capital — Persian opposition effectually
barred enterprise in that direction. Greek merchants carried
on trade between Constantinople and Moscow. There was
a certain amount of trade with Sweden and by way of Livonia
and Novgorod, and also by way of Poland commercial rela-
tions were maintained with Germany. Direct trading
relations with England were opened up in 1555 by way of
Archangel, and English visitors were among the first to give
detailed accounts of the Tsardom of Moscovy to the Western
26 Russia of the Russians
The centre of Eastern European trade and the capital of the
Tsars was a city of churches and cathedrals. Ecclesiastical
controversies aroused intense popular interest. There was the
conflict with heresies, such as that of the so-called Judaisers and
that of a layman named Bashkin, which seems to have been
a distant echo of the Protestant Reformation. There was the
long controversy over the question of landholding by monas-
teries, which possessed altogether about a third of the lands of
Muscovy. There was the constant resort for counsel in things
spiritual and material to religious recluses, men and women,
though many just as frequently resorted to astrologers and
fortune-tellers. There were the important questions of
Church government that arose with the assumption of the
title Patriarch by the chief prelate of Moscow in the seven-
teenth century. All these questions greatly excited the
minds of the pious Muscovites in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. They were indeed most assiduous in the
observance of ecclesiastical as of every other kind of custom,
but this did not prevent them from grossly indulging their
appetites on occasion. It was a heavy, barbarous, uncritical
life that the Muscovites lived, entangled in a network of
custom, petty intrigue and stratagem, coarsely material,
yet with a rich fund of humour and shrewd popular wisdom,
and with an extraordinary capacity for devotion at the heart
of it all. This capacity for devotion was displayed in the
strange ecclesiastical movement in the middle of the seven-
teenth century when the Patriarch Nikon used his immense,
almost monarchical authority, to impose on the Church in
spite of the vehement opposition of the masses, new and more
correct translations of the service books. Hundreds cheerfully
submitted to torture or went to the stake rather than accept
innovations that they considered heretical. These schis-
matics, the so-called Old Believers, were driven to the confines
of Russian territory, and they, too, became agents in the
manifold process of Russian expansion.
After the death of Ivan the Terrible the State of Moscow
The Growth of Russia 27
passed through a period of the severest strain. Ivan's son,
Feodor, ruled with the aid of a powerful noble of Tartar
descent named Boris Godunov. Feodor left no heir, and
with his death that branch of the Rurik line which occupied
the Moscow throne came to an end. Boris Godunov had
himself elected Tsar, but for all his shrewdness and ability
he was unable to maintain his authority effectively over the
rival boyars. When Godunov died the throne was seized
by a Pretender whom Sigismund of Poland put forward as
a son of Ivan named Dimitri. The False Dimitri was murdered,
and a boyar named Vasili Shuisky had himself elected by a
small clique of his fellows. Vasili was deposed and taken as
prisoner to Warsaw. Another Dimitri appeared, and was
known as the Robber of Tushino from that village to the
North- West of Moscow, where he had his seat and whence
he exercised with the help of Cossacks and certain of the
boyars a feeble rule. The land was a prey to anarchy. Things
were bad enough when there was a real Tsar at the head of
affairs. The common people were oppressed beyond all
endurance by the Government and nobles, and abject ser-
vility, beggary and crime were the inevitable consequences.
But now there was no restraining influence whatever. Every
man was striving for his own hand, and pillaged where he
could. The country was open to foreign invaders. The
Swedes seized Novgorod. The Poles occupied Moscow,
and mocked at the Orthodox faith. The boyars scattered,
seeking to secure their own advantage either by supporting
the Robber of Tushino or by acknowledging as Tsar Wladislaw,
the son of the Polish king Sigismund. The Polish garrison
massacred the inhabitants of Moscow. Finally, at the appeal
of a butcher in Nizhni-Novgorod named Minin, the people
rose and organised a militia under the leadership of a prince
named Pozharski and other obscure nobles and gentry. The
militia marched up the Volga to Yaroslav and crossed over
to Moscow, where they found a force of the Tuihino Cossacks
besieging the Poles at leisure. The Cossacks and the militia
28 Russia of the Russians
viewed each other with distrust, but finally co-operated to
such an extent that the isolated garrison fell before them,
and Sigismund, who was hastening to its relief, was turned
back on the way. The last few months of 1612 were occupied
in preparations for the election of a new Tsar. A National
Assembly was convened, and messengers were sent over the
country to test the opinion of the people. Finally, after a
long struggle between various factions, the choice of the
assembly fell on a sixteen-year-old youth named Michael
Romanov, the son of a prominent boyar, who had been made
patriarch at Tushino under the name of Philaret. The
Romanovs were distantly connected with the house of Rurik
through Anastasia Romanova, the first wife of Ivan the
Terrible. The election which took place on February 26th,
1613, was approved by the people, and Michael reigned
peaceably, yielding the control of affairs for the first few years
to his energetic father, Philaret. The fact that at a supremely
critical moment, when all the leaders failed with the one
exception of the Patriarch Hermogen, the State was saved
by the direct efforts of the people is a remarkable proof of
the vitality of the nation that had grown up under such difficult
conditions in the North-East. The value of popular initiative
was recognised during Michael's reign by the convocation
of several National Assemblies or Zemskie Sobory, but the
purely autocratic principle steadily recovered strength, and
the nation again became completely subservient to the State.
Michael's reign was a period of recuperation. His son,
Alexei or Alexis, was a retiring man, given to pious works,
but it fell to his lot to carry on the work of expansion. An
insurrection of the Cossacks of the Ukraine or western steppe
against Polish rule led to Russian intervention and a long
war with Poland, which resulted in Moscow's securing by the
Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667 the possession of Kiev and the
territory on the left bank of the Dnieper. During the war
with Poland a war broke out with Sweden. A Russian army
entered Livland but was driven back with loss, and peace
The Growth of Russia 29
was concluded in 1661. The submission of the Cossacks
west of the Dnieper to the Sultan, led to a war with Turkey
(1672-1681), and after the Turks had alarmed Christendom
by appearing before the walls of Vienna, Russia accepted
the invitation of the Polish king, Jan Sobieski, to join a coalition
against the Mohammedan power. The second half of the
seventeenth century was thus devoted to irregular warfare
with the three powers that prevented the expansion of Russia
westward and southward.
The oppressive character of Muscovite administration pro-
voked in the course of the century popular risings in Moscow,
Novgorod and Pskov, and in 1667 a very serious insurrection
of Cossacks and peasants in the Volga region under the
leadership of Stenka Razin, who became a hero of folk-song.
Alexis was succeeded by his eldest son Feodor, who reigned
only six years (1676-1682), and then after all these " quiet
tsars," these tame and characterless first
Peter the Romanovs, came Peter the Great like a
whirlwind, and with almost superhuman
energy transformed the Tsardom of Muscovy into the Russian
Empire. The autocracy had been consolidated after the Time
of Trouble, not by the Tsars themselves, but chiefly owing
to the work of such able advisers as Michael's father, Philaret,
and Ordyn-Nashchokin, the leading statesman under Tsar
Alexis. Into the autocratic authority thus established
Peter put all the rude force of his personal character, and
used it as an instrument for dragging the Russian State from
the sleepy remoteness of the heart of the plain into the restless
and complex world of modern Europe. Peter was strikingly
unlike his immediate predecessors, but in Philaret and in
Peter's half-sister, the Princess Sophia, there was a turbulent
energy that resembled his own. And then Peter's education
was the reverse of the typical education of a Moscow Tsar.
When he was eleven years old, his sister Sophia organised
a mutiny of the Strieltsy, or soldiers of the standing army,
and drove Peter's mother and all the members of her family
30 Russia of the Russians
out of the palace on the Kremlin and, still retaining her
position as Regent for Peter and his brother the co-tsar
Ivan, a wholly incompetent weakling, concentrated all the
power in her own hands and those of her favourites. Peter
lived with his mother in the village of Preobrazhenskoe, outside
the city walls, where he was left very much to his own devices.
He played at soldiers and sailors, built toy boats, gathered
around him a host of playmates of noble and humble birth
whom he organised into a sham army that afterwards formed
the nucleus of a real, modern army. His experiences in the
Kremlin at the time of the mutiny had filled him with a life-
long disgust for the older Muscovite ways, and near Preob-
razhenskoe he came into contact with a foreign colony that
opened up for him a new world. Here his passion for
mechanics was gratified, and from a Dutchman named Timmer-
man he learned arithmetic, geometry, fortification, and the
use of the astrolobe. A Swiss adventurer named Lefort,
with whom Peter made friends, arranged boisterous revels
that effaced from the mind of the young Tsar those few
lessons in the staid etiquette of the Kremlin that had been
given him in his childhood. Peter was personally cut adrift
from the old Moscow tradition before he came of age. He,
a son of the plain, conceived a passion for the sea. The scent
of salt breezes drew him westwards. He sent hundreds of
young men abroad to learn the arts and handicrafts. He
built a flotilla on the river Voronezh, and with the aid of this
and of his newly-cast artillery, he took Azov from the Turks.
Finally, in 1697, he himself went abroad to learn more
thoroughly what Europe could teach in the matter of ship-
building and artillery. He visited Holland where he worked
as a carpenter in the shipyards of Saardam and Amsterdam,
and spent several months in England. England interested
him immensely, but mainly from the mechanical side. He
was constantly to be seen at the dockyards at Deptford
and at the Woolwich arsenal. He went frequently to the
Tower to see the Mint. He once went to the House of Lords
The Growth of Russia 31
where he saw King William on the throne, and heard some
of the lords speak. He afterwards remarked to his companions
that it was a very good thing to hear subjects freely expressing
their views in the presence of their monarch, but he certainly
did not dream of anything like constitutionalism for his own
country. Peter went to Oxford, but he does not seem to
have come into touch with English intellectual life at any
point. When he was not looking at guns or ships or museums
he spent his time in carousals with his companions, English
and Russian. After he left, the owner of the house in which
he had lived presented a bill for damages. The interior of
the house had been completely ruined, the floor and valuable
furniture broken and covered with filth, windows broken,
pictures riddled with bullets. William III paid the heavy
bill out of his own pocket.
Peter came back to Moscow after a stay of fifteen months
abroad, with his mind full of ideas of the purely technical
side of Western civilisation, and these he proceeded to apply
in practice. But his mechanical reforms were made sub-
servient to certain simple but broad ideas. He knew that
Russia would be economically and politically stifled unless
she secured a seaboard, and he bent his energies to the con-
quest of the Baltic coast. In 1700 he renewed the struggle
with Sweden and used all his recently gained technical
knowledge, strained to the utmost all the resources of Muscovy
in money and men in the gigantic effort through unremitting
wars and a remodelling of the whole administrative system
to lift the State to a new plane of development. The marvel
was that he attained his end. One effect of his work was
that the State penetrated more deeply into the life of the
nation than ever before. He bound all classes to the State
with iron bonds, made the whole people follow him panting
and bleeding in his restless career. Personally he was a very
human man. He was big, burly, passionate, a great drinker
and reveller, and a lover of coarse pranks, an excellent
mechanic, the best shipbuilder in Russia, extremely simple
32 Russia of the Russian:,
and economical in most of his personal habits, good-natured,
but on occasion ruthlessly cruel, restlessly active, but lacking
in reflective capacity. But all these qualities acquired an
immense impetus from the position of Peter on the frontier
of two ages and of two worlds, and from the extraordinary
character of the work he was called upon to do. He loomed
up in the popular imagination like some terrible demiurge,
and the legend went abroad that he was Antichrist. To
this day it is difficult to form an exact estimate of his character.
He has set such a wide range of forces in motion that it is
difficult not to fall into the error of regarding him as their
source. Peter, the man, the shipwright-tsar, with twitching
face, in rusty caftan and with shoes down at the heel, is
lost in the conception of the empire-builder, the maker of a
vast modern Russia. He becomes a symbol, the embodiment
of the elemental, forward-rushing forces of the Russian people.
Peter was always reforming, always mending. Yet most
of his reforms were the result of impulse, were set in motion
on the spur of the moment during a lull in a campaign, or
upon a hint from some roaming foreigner. He divided
Russia into governments for fiscal purposes, so as more
systematically to squeeze out of the population money for
the maintenance of his rapidly growing army and fleet.
Then the central Government institutions proved but poor
makeshifts in such a time of stress and he had to reform
them, substituting for the unwieldy Muscovite prikazy or
inchoate ministries, Boards or Colleges on the Swedish model,
and for the Boyarskaya Duma or Council of Boyars, a Senate
which should serve as the interpreter of the Tsar's will. He
created a modern army, establishing a principle of military
service that embraced all classes. He built the first Russian
fleet. He detested the clergy, and instituted a toper's club
in the form of a parody on the hierarchy with a buffoon as
mock patriarch ; but more serious was his complete abolition
of the real patriarchate and his transference of the control
of Church affairs to a board or ministry called the Synod
The Growth of Russia 33
with a layman at its head. The war with Sweden, known
as the Northern War, which had for Russia such important
consequences, lasted off and on for twenty-one years. But
Peter drifted into it almost by chance, was defeated during
its early stages, and had no plan of campaign long and carefully
calculated in advance. He was drawn on by the development
of events to the fulfilment of his dream of the conquest of
the seaboard. He was beaten at Narva, but in 1703 he beat
the Swedes at Nyenschantz on the site of the present St.
Petersburg, and again in the first sea fight won by Russians
in modern times. But the war dragged on, and it was not
until 1709 that a decisive battle was won. The Swedish
King, Charles XII, with his magnificent army had crossed
the Vistula in 1707, and with the aid of Cossacks of the
Ukraine under Mazeppa, hoped finally to break the growing
power of the Russian Tsar. But the plain drew on the masters
of the sea, and two years afterwards Peter had no difficulty
in scattering Charles's worn out army at Poltava in the heart
of the steppe.
When peace was concluded in 1721, Russia found herself
in permanent possession of the territory on the banks of
the Neva and of the provinces of Livland and Esthonia.
The command of the Baltic was secure. It was made more
secure by an act which has had no parallel since Constantine
founded a new Rome on the shores of the Bosphorus. Peter
built on the swamps of the Neva a capital, looking out upon
the sea and upon Europe. No other spot was so suitable
for the great work. Archangel, which had long been the
port for trade with the west, was too precarious and too remote
an outlet, and Novgorod, the centre of north-western trade
from the earliest times, was too far inland. In 1703 Peter
built himself, on one of the islands of the delta a cottage,
which is shown to this day, and thence directed the construc-
tion of fortresses, churches, shipyards, wooden palaces,
Government offices, barracks, the draining of swamps, and the
cutting through the dense forests on the left bank of the Neva
34 Russia of the Russians
the avenues that became the " prospects," the chief arteries of
the new city. He dragged his boyars from their snug homes
in old-fashioned Moscow to his bleak and comfortless half-
German " Sankt Peterburg " with its Peterhofs and Oranien-
baums. He imported artisans from abroad, and populated
the city with his new regiments, and with artisans and peasants
from the interior. The city was built by forced labour, and
thousands perished under the hard toil. But Peter had his
way, and the capital on the Neva became a lasting monument
to his rude, creative energy. The very Neva is akin to him.
Its broad, mighty stream flowing swiftly to the sea is the
mirror of his impetuous striving.
Russia survived Peter's knout, and there could be no
better proof of the nation's vitality. During his reign one-
fifth of the peasantry simply disappeared, either in war or
in terror-stricken flight from intolerable imposts and military
service. Three-quarters of the whole budget was devoted
to military and naval purposes, and little or nothing was done
to relieve the wretched plight of the people. Yet in forcing
backward Russia into the European family of the nations,
Peter did the main thing necessary to ensure her progress.
In the century that followed his death the Empire — Peter
had assumed the title of Emperor (Imperator) — slowly
adapted itself to the new situation.
Peter was succeeded by his second wife Catherine, a former
camp-follower, who reigned with firmness and tact for two
years, and then came a dreary period of nonentities. During
the reigns of Peter's grandson, Peter II, his niece Anna
Ioannovna and the short regency of her niece Anna Leopold-
ovna, the Germanised Court was plunged in heavy sensuality
and in sordid and viscid intrigue. Peter's capable daughter,
Elizabeth, drove out Anna Leopoldovna with her son and
her Germans in 1741, and reigned with signal ability for twenty
years. Elizabeth tried to train as her successor her nephew,
Karl Peter Ulrich, Duke of Holstein Gottorp, but this youth
proved hopelessly incompetent, and was murdered
The Growth of Russia 35
immediately after his accession to the throne by the
partisans of his wife, by birth a Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst,
who ascended the throne as Catherine II.
The process of territorial expansion continued throughout
the century in spite of all the intrigues in St. Petersburg.
There was a constant succession of wars,
Territorial an( j R uss j a played various parts in combina-
fc,xD3.nsion
tions in which were concerned the newly
established Kingdom of Prussia, the France of the last three
Louis, the England of the Georges, the Austria of Maria
Theresa and Joseph II, an enfeebled Sweden, an expiring
Poland, and a declining, but still menacing Turkey. In the
first half of the century Russia supported Austria, in the
second half the Prussia of Frederick the Great. There was
a moment before Catherine's accession when Russian troops
occupied Berlin. Poland was a pawn in the political game
of the neighbouring powers, and in the reign of Catherine II
was thrice divided, Russia receiving all Lithuania and the
Ukraine or Little Russia west of the Dnieper. After long
wars with Turkey and the conquest of the Crimea in 1784,
Russia finally secured her hold on the Black Sea from the
mouth of the Bug to the foot of the Caucasus, and in 1783
the last King of Georgia, Irakli, dreading absorption by Persia,
acknowledged the sovereignty of the Russian Empress. From
Persia Russia conquered the north-western shore of the
Caspian. By the end of the eighteenth century almost the whole
of what is known as European Russia, besides a considerable
portion of Siberia, acknowledged the rule of the Tsars.
The strain which this expansion involved on the resources
of the nation was terrible, and a relaxation of internal tension
was necessary. Catherine realised this, and
Catherine of f rom the beginning of her reign deliberately
set herself to promote the welfare of her
subjects. She summoned a commission to draw up a general
scheme of reforms based on the principles of Montesquieu.
The plan proved impracticable, but the Empress did not
36 Russia of the Russians
abandon the work of gradual internal reform. She began
to loosen the bonds which enslaved the population to the
State and promoted education, the arts, and learning. She
opened schools, had schoolbooks translated, enlarged the
Moscow University, which had been founded in Elizabeth's
reign, gathered scholars around her, and with their aid engaged
in the scientific study of her Empire. In a comparative
vocabulary of the languages of the world undertaken at her
instance by a versatile scholar named Pallas many entries
were made by her own hand. Catherine corresponded with
the French encyclopaedists, toyed with literature after the
French manner of the period, and wrote plays, satirical
essays, and memoirs. It is true that the effect of her civilising
influence did not extend beyond the gentry, and that the
masses of the people remained ignorant as before. Indeed,
owing to the privileges Catherine granted to the gentry,
serfdom became even more oppressive than it had been ;
peasant risings were frequent in consequence, and a rising
of peasants and Cossacks in Eastern Russia under the leader-
ship of a young Cossack named Emelian Pugachev, who gave
himself out to be the Tsar Peter Feodorovich, gave the
Government serious trouble for two years. To conceal the
wretchedness of the people from his sovereign's eyes Catherine's
favourite, Potemkin, set up sham villages full of well-dressed,
smiling peasants along the route of her journey to the Crimea.
But Catherine was sincerely desirous of the national welfare
and her reign, in spite of a thousand defects, was one of real
progress for Russia. Peter raised the new building of Russian
statehood, but it was Catherine who first made it at all
habitabla
Catherine was succeeded in 1795 by her unhappy, half-
witted son, Paul, whose childishly irresponsible use of absolute
power led to his assassination by a band of Court conspirators
in 1801. Paul's uncanny face as depicted in Borovikovski's
portrait of him in the Winter Palace, with the staring eyes,
snub nose, wide nostrils, gaping mouth, seems as though
The Growth of Russia 37
it had been thrust out mockingly from between the splendours
of the preceding and following reigns for the express purpose
of reminding the world of the deep-lying tragedy associated
with the rise of Russian power.
Perhaps it was because of the complicity of Alexander I
in his father's murder that the note of tragedy pervaded his
brilliant reign. Alexander began well. When
Alexander I. he ascended the throne the air was full of
echoes of the French Revolution, and
Napoleon was rapidly rising to power. Alexander's tutor,
the Swiss Laharpe, had instilled into him broad ideas of
liberty, equality, and justice which he made some sincere
attempts to put into execution. He gave a pledge to the
representatives of the Finnish people on their surrender to
him before the close of the Swedish war in 1808, to observe
the autonomous rights of the Grand Duchy. When, at the
Congress of Vienna in 1815, the territory now known as the
Kingdom of Poland was allotted to him, he gave its inhab-
itants a constitution, and seems to have been very eager
for a time that it should be a success. He made the German
gentry of the Baltic Provinces emancipate their serfs. In
all these measures considerations of political expediency
were reinforced by a hankering sympathy with Liberal ideas.
Moreover, the Napoleonic wars threw Russia into the whirl
of European conflicts. Russia became a part of Europe as
never before. Napoleon himself was attracted by the vastness
of the Russian power, risked all his glory to gain it, and lost,
defeated not by Russian generalship, but by the elemental
forces of the great plain of which only the dwellers on it know
the hard-won secret. The march of the Grande Armee to
Moscow, the stabling of troopers' horses in the cathedrals
of the Kremlin, the burning of the ancient capital, Napoleon's
retreat over the snow-clad plain, his flight — these were the
events that for the first time united Russia emotionally with
Europe, and gave Russian patriotism a modern colouring.
Deepened national feeling bore splendid literary fruit in the
38 Russia of the Russians
work of Pushkin and his contemporaries. The nineteenth
century dawned in glory and in the hope of liberty. A tremor
of life and intelligence passed through the inert mass of the
Russian nation. The impetus to development given in the
reign of Catherine now took effect. Society in the capitals
became thoroughly European in character. In the literary
circles of St. Petersburg and Moscow there were not a few
men who were steeped in the best European culture of
the period. The arts were cultivated, and St. Petersburg
became from the architectural point of view one of the finest
capitals in Europe. In the masses of the people, too, there
was a vague groping restlessness born partly of the Old
Believers' and other religious movements, partly of the
Pugachev insurrection, and partly of the roving of Russian
armies over Europe during the great campaigns of Suverov
during the reigns of Catherine and Paul, and the Napoleonic
wars in the early years of Alexander's reign. The reforms
of Catherine's reign had not only liberated the gentry from
such humiliating subservience to the State as was involved
in the liability to corporal punishment. They had practically
given over the management of the new provincial institutions
into the gentry's hands. This was one way to train up a
governing class, but as the gentry retained unlimited control
over their peasants, the lot of the serfs was even harder than
before. It was among the nobles and gentry, however, that
the idea of the emancipation of the serfs was first clearly
expressed. And this idea was connected with that of the
limitation of the autocracy. Alexander's friends and advisers
at the beginning of his reign, Novosiltsev, Stroganov, who
had at one time been librarian of the Jacobin club in Paris,
the Polish patriot, Adam Czartoryzski, and Kochubei, who
had been educated in England, were all advocates of both
constitutionalism and emancipation.
But of these dreams nothing came in Alexander's reign.
There was a radical reform of the central administrative
institutions. The " colleges " were replaced by ministries,
The Growth of Russia 39
and the Senate was made the highest Court of Appeal in the
Empire. With the aid of a remarkable statesman, Speranski,
the son of a village priest, Alexander established the Council
of the Empire, a permanent body of high officials for drafting
laws and undertook, but did not complete, a far-reaching
and much-needed plan of financial reform. After the Congress
of Vienna, Alexander's reforming ardour gradually cooled,
and from 1820 onwards he became openly reactionary. His
chief associates during this period were the fierce martinet
and supporter of autocracy, Arakcheiev, and an ignorant
and obscurantist cleric named Photii. He sank into a vague
kind of mysticism, became gloomy and morose, travelled
constantly over Russia as though pursued by an evil
conscience, and finally died at Taganrog in 1825.
Alexander was a well-meaning man, capable of generous
enthusiasm, and the great events of his reign invested him with
a halo of romance. But there were in him curious elements
of weakness, a strange twist in his character that leaves
an impression of inner failure, of rich possibilities blighted.
Liberal and revolutionary ideas had spread very widely
among the educated class during Alexander's reign, and
among the army officers a number of secret
Nicholas. societies had been formed with the object
of establishing a republican Russia. On the
death of Alexander and the accession of his younger brother
Nicholas, in place of the next of age, Constantine, who had
abandoned his claim to the throne, a number of Guards'
officers belonging to these societies raised a mutiny in the
Senate Square in St. Petersburg, and demanded the acknow-
ledgment of Constantine as Emperor and the promulgation
of a constitution. The mutiny was suppressed, five of its
ringleaders hung, and thirty-one exiled to Siberia, and
Nicholas in person conducted a rigorous inquiry into the
work of the secret societies. This event greatly alarmed
Nicholas and set its stamp on the whole of his reign. Like
his brother, Nicholas began with plans of reform, but very
4— (2400)
40 Russia of the Russians
soon yielded to his despotic instincts, and resolutely opposed
all the progressive tendencies that were rapidly making
headway among the educated classes in his time. His general
attitude is well expressed in a comment he made on a
report on education submitted to him by the poet Pushkin.
" Morality, diligent service and zeal," he declared, " are
to be preferred to crude, immoral and useless education."
Nicholas did not aim at suppressing education. He wished
to subject it to rigid principles, to eliminate from it all
revolutionary tendencies, to make it subservient to his chief
aim of training up the people in loyalty to Orthodoxy, Auto-
cracy and the Russian Nationality. Indeed, some of the
young scholars whom he sent abroad to study afterwards
became leaders of light and learning in the universities of
Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kazan.
But the general effect of Nicholas' measures was to stifle
the free expression of thought, and as during his reign literature
developed with rapidly increasing intensity the struggle between
harsh police measures and an implacable censorship on the
one hand and ardent thought and aspiration on the other,
made the life of the educated classes excessively gloomy and
depressing. German intellectual influences found their way
into Russia, and gradually thrust French influence into the
background. The philosophy of Schelling and Hegel was
eagerly debated by groups of students and literary men.
At this time it became possible sharply to distinguish two
main tendencies of thought which strongly influenced subse-
quent development, those of the Slavophils and the West-
erners. The Slavophils, adapting Hegelian theories, asserted
that Russia possessed in her own traditions and her own
institutions, the principles necessary for her future develop-
ment ; they dreamt of a Russia of free, self-governing com-
munities under the shadow of the Autocracy and the
Orthodox Church. The Westerners, on the other hand,
strongly insisted that Russia could progress only through
the adoption of Western institutions and Western culture.
The Growth of Russia 41
All Nicholas' repressive measures failed to check the ferment
of ideas : they only gave it an increasingly political, and in
the end, a revolutionary character. It was during Nicholas'
reign that the stormy anarchist Bakunin, and that most
striking of Russian political thinkers, Herzen, began their
long exile in Western Europe, where they worked each in
his own way for the political development of Russia.
Nicholas was a manly, soldierly kind of ruler, with a strong
sense of responsibility. But he trusted neither his people
nor his officials, and tried to concentrate the administration
of the Empire in his own hands, the result being only an
oppressive development of the police system, and a steady
growth of corruption amongst officials of all kinds. His
despotic inclinations were intensified by the Polish insurrection
in 1831, and by the French Revolution of 1848, and it was
because he felt that it was his mission to oppose revolution
in all forms that he sent his troops to quell the Hungarian
insurrection in 1848. He made some slight additions to the
territory of the Empire as the result of a war with Turkey
in 1829, but the Crimean war in which he became involved
at the close of his reign, brought him only humiliating defeats,
and forced him to realise the disastrous effects of his despotic
system of government on that very military efficiency that
he prized so highly. Deeply mortified by the revelations of
corruption in the army, he cried, " My friends the Decem-
brists (the leaders of the mutiny in December, 1825)
would never have done this." Nicholas died in 1855,
before the end of the war, and was succeeded by his son
Alexander II.
The second half of the nineteenth century was marked
by a fierce conflict between the old order and developing
social forces. The process of expansion fell
Social Unrest, into the background. The western frontiers
of the Empire were fixed, and expansion
eastward into the territory of decaying Central Asiatic
Khanates was almost effortless. The Russian people had
42 Russia of the Russians
at last conquered the plain, and the Government availed
itself of European technical discoveries to strengthen its
hold on the plain by purely mechanical means such as railways
and telegraphs. Railways and telegraphs, in fact, served the
purposes of bureaucratic centralisation, but at the same
time hastened the dissemination of new ideas. The Europe
of the nineteenth century was elated and turbulent in its
pursuit of progress. The world was a modern world. The
old Muscovite seclusion was a thing of the far distant past.
It was impossible to hold the great plain by Muscovite methods,
or even the methods of Peter the Great, and the principles
and methods of that virile despot Nicholas I had been tried
in the Crimean War, and been found wholly wanting even
from the standpoint of a merely mechanical grasp on territory.
The Russian people had hitherto blindly followed the lead
of an unknown destiny. But it could no longer be dragged
at the heels of destiny in the form of the State. To hold and
administer its immense territory the State was compelled
to train a modern army and to educate a bureaucracy. But
the training institutions were channels by which European
ideas found their way into the minds of the governed. The
universities turned out the Government official and the
revolutionary, and often enough both in one person. The
educated classes were keenly aware of the position of the
people, and struggled to secure for it the right of intelligent
participation in the great task of nation-building. The
Government now yielded to the demand for reform, now
retreated to its old positions. The struggle was full of tragedy,
of that intricate tragedy that seems implicit in Russian
development. It was a struggle between the spirit of the
steppe and the spirit of the forest. And the goal of the
idealists who fought against the old order was a liberty as
vast and as exhilarating as the plain itself. This ideal is
still present, deeply troubling, but in the process of struggle
it is gradually passing from the region of abstraction to that
of real and minute achievement.
The Growth of Russia 43
Alexander II, like his uncle, Alexander I, began with
reforms and ended in reaction. But the reforms of Alexander
II were very far-reaching, and marked the
Alexander II. beginning of a new epoch of development.
The new Emperor first of all modified the
severity of the police regime, gave a certain amount of liberty
to the press, and then with the help of his talented brother,
Constantine Nikolaievich, the enlightened Grand Duchess
Elena Pavlovna, who cultivated the friendship of scholars
and literary men, and had effected the organisation of medical
aid to the wounded during the Crimean War, the broad-minded
statesman, Nicholas Miliutin, and many other men of mark,
he began the work of reform from the base upwards. The
first and most urgent task to be undertaken was that of the
emancipation of the serfs. From the end of the eighteenth
century onwards, Tiberals had demanded the abolition of
serfdom, the more enlightened landowners had long since
begun to realise that it was economically unprofitable, and
the disasters of the Crimean War had shown the Emperor
himself that the continued existence of serfdom was a danger
to the State. Committees were organised in the various
governments to study the question, and editorial commissions
sifted the materials. The Chief Committee in St. Petersburg
finally drafted an elaborate emancipation scheme which,
after discussion in the Council of the Empire, was in its main
features confirmed by the Emperor, and in a manifesto issued
on February 19th (March 4th), 1861, which the landlords were
commanded to read to their assembled peasants, the institution
of serfdom was abolished in Russia. Alexander's energy in
carrying this great reform through in the teeth of the opposi-
tion of powerful cliques of reactionary landlords, was the
more remarkable seeing that he was not a reformer by instinct
or training, but was simply convinced of the political necessity
of the measure. Over ten million peasants were liberated
and enabled to purchase allotments of land from their former
masters through the Government, by means of a system of
44 Russia of the Russians
redemption payments, spread out over a long term of years
in the form of an addition to the taxes. In Little Russia
the allotments became the property of individual peasants,
while amongst the Great Russian peasantry the ownership
of the land of the freed serfs was vested in the village com-
munes. The change effected was a veritable upheaval, and
in order to cope with the immense work of reorganisation
involved a reform of local government became necessary.
Zemstvos or Provincial and District Councils, composed of
elected representatives of the gentry, the peasantry and the
townspeople, were established in thirty-three governments of
European Russia with power to levy rates, to maintain
schools, roads and hospitals, and generally to promote the
economic welfare of the population. The Zemstvos became
strongholds of progress, training schools for public workers,
and forerunners of constitutionalism in Russia. Justice
was in a deplorable condition, and here, too, reform was
urgently necessary. By measures enacted in 1864 a radically
new judicial system was established, theoretically more perfect,
juster, more humane than any other European system. All
these reforms, known as the Great Reforms of the Sixties,
aroused an ardour for progress, a passionate humanitarianism,
a sense of rich and manifold opportunity such as had never
been known in Russia before. Public opinion came into
existence in a land till then almost inarticulate, and public
opinion was aboundingly optimistic. But the hopes awakened
by the reforms fell short of fulfilment, and in 1866 a reaction
set in.
The comparative liberty given to the press in the early
years of Alexander's reign had stimulated an intellectual
movement ; social and political questions were eagerly
debated under a thin veil of literary criticism, and public
opinion divided itself into three camps — the Slavophils,
and a Liberal and a Socialist group of Westerners. The chief
organ of the Liberals was Herzen's Kolokol (The Bell), which
was published in London, was read by influential members
The Growth of Russia 45
of the Government, including the Emperor himself, and
greatly influenced the course of the Emancipation Reform.
The Slavophils, led by Aksakov and Samarin, had their
centre in Moscow, while the Radicals, under the leadership
of Chernishevski, were grouped around the monthly
Sovremennik. The growth of Radical and Socialist tendencies
alarmed the Government, and in 1862 Chernishevski and
several of his associates were arrested and deported to the
Siberian mines. The insurrection which broke out in Poland
in 1863, and which provoked the Government to severe
reprisals, including the entire abolition of Polish autonomy,
was at first looked on by the Russian Liberals with a certain
sympathy. But the intervention of European powers at the
instance of Napoleon III led to a strong revulsion of feeling
in favour of the Government, and a prominent Liberal publicist,
Katkov, became from this time on the ablest advocate of the
Government policy. Herzen, by strongly taking the side
of the Poles during the insurrection, lost the enormous prestige
he had hitherto enjoyed in Russia, and he became identified
with the Radical group. It was about this time that the
so-called " Nihilist " tendency made itself manifest. The
Nihilists were the Futurists of that period. They were young
Radicals who in their passion for science and progress scoffed
at aesthetics, defied conventions of every kind, pooh-poohed
religion and tradition, and admitted no guide but reason.
But Nihilism was only a tendency. There was never a party
called Nihilists, and Nihilists were not necessarily terrorists,
though terrorists were often Nihilists in their attitude to
life. It was from the tumult of conflicting forces that marked
the early sixties that the revolutionary movement developed.
Alexander grew weary of reform and alarmed at the complex
variety of social forces his reforms had called into action, and
when in 1866 a nam named Karakozov, acting entirely on
his own responsibility, fired a shot at the Emperor, the policy
of the Government was reversed. A new period of reaction
began, and during this period the revolutionary movement
46 Russia of the Russians
steadily gained in strength. No further reforms were granted,
repressive measures were directed against the press and the
Zemstvos, and the police powers of the governors were
extended. Amongst the students of the universities arose
a movement known as " going into the people," which meant
that educated young men and women carried the University
Settlement principle to its utmost limit, that is to say, they
tried to bring enlightenment to the ignorant peasants by
mixing with them, and living and dressing exactly as they did.
At first this movement had a purely educative and human-
itarian character. It was only later that it became political.
The political revolutionary movement was developed abroad
by Bakunin and his associates. But the Government, by
constantly arresting young men and women who gathered
together in conspirative mutual improvement societies where
they eagerly studied how they might be useful to the people,
promoted the growth of a revolutionary movement at home.
Prince Kropotkin brought Bakunin's revolutionary writings
into Russia, and hundreds of students went amongst the
peasants, this time not to teach them the alphabet, but to
incite them to insurrection. About a thousand of these
students were arrested. The Government redoubled its
repressive measures, and struck at random in its efforts to
crush the revolutionary movement. But the revolutionaries
organised in 1876 a party under the name of Land and Liberty
with the object of bringing about an agrarian revolution.
This was the first organisation of any strength that was
avowedly terrorist in character. A peaceable demonstration
arranged by the party in the Kazan Square in St. Petersburg,
led to a large number of arrests and to fresh additions to the
long procession eastwards to Siberia. In 1877 a girl named
Vera Zasulich fired at and wounded General Trepov the
prefect of St. Petersburg, because he had a political prisoner
flogged for refusing to lift his hat. The Government, hoping
to rally public opinion to its side, had the case tried in open
court, but Vera Zasulich defended herself with such effect
The Growth of Russia 47
that she won the sympathy of the public, and the jury acquitted
her. This incident greatly stimulated the energies of the
terrorists.
But the revolutionaries were at that time a small minority.
The reaction weighed heavily on all classes, but it could not
stay a powerful intellectual movement, and it was in the
sixties and seventies that Turgeniev, Tolstoy and Dcstoievski
produced the novels that made Russian literature famous
throughout Europe. The Government itself had recourse
to the aid of the press, and its efforts to form a strong body
of conservative public opinion were vigorousfy supported
by Katkov, who in the Moskovskia Viedonwsti (Moscow
Gazette), supplied the Government with ideas in the shape
of an extreme Nationalism. A wave of genuine national
enthusiasm swept over the country when, in 1877, Alexander
came to Moscow and solemnly declared war against Turkey
in the name of the liberation of the Bulgarians. There was
a momentary revival of the ardour of the early sixties, and
many disappointed revolutionaries rushed to the front to
serve as volunteers or as medical helpers. But the war had
no effect on the internal situation, and Liberals complained
bitterly that the Emperor, who had given a constitution to
liberated Bulgaria, withheld one from his own Empire.
Terrorist attacks on governors and gendarme officers became
frequent, and two more attempts were made on the life of
Alexander. The " Land and Liberty " party split into a
purely terrorist group named the Narodnaya Volia, or" People's
Will," and an agrarian group, and the Narodnaya Volia
entered on a systematic terrorist campaign. The Government
retaliated by multiplying repressive measures and, in 1880,
an Armenian, Count Loris-Melikov, was appointed Dictator
for the purpose of rooting out sedition. A lull in the terrorist
campaign gave Loris-Melikov, who was in friendly intercourse
with the Zemstvo Liberals, occasion to induce Alexander
to continue the work of reform by preparing the ground for
a constitution. But he had hardly begun to put his plans
48 Russia of the Russians
into execution when on March 14th, 1881, Alexander II,
when driving in a sleigh along the Catherine Canal in St.
Petersburg, was killed by bombs thrown by the terrorists
of the Narodnaya Volia.
The murder of Alexander II threw back the work of reform
for years and intensified the reaction. Alexander III, the
new Emperor, believed solely in police methods
Alexander III. of government, and the Nationalism of Katkov
and of Alexander's chief adviser, that strange
reactionary for conscience' sake, Pobiedcnostsev, formed the
staple of the Government policy. The Russian Empire
includes a large number of peoples of non-Russian nationality
whom the Russians had subdued in the process of their con-
quest of the plain. There are Germans, Poles and Esthonians
in the Baltic provinces, Poles in the South-West, Little-
Russians in the South, Jews in the former territory of the
Polish State, Armenians, Georgians, and a host of smaller
peoples in the Caucasus, Tartars in the Caucasus, in Eastern
Russia and Siberia, and a variety of other peoples in Siberia
and Central Asia. The Government aimed at forcibly assim-
ilating these peoples to the Russian nationality, but the policy
of Russification instead of consolidating the unity of the
Empire aroused bitter resentment against the ruling race.
The chief sufferers during the reign of Alexander III were
the Poles, the Jews, and the Germans of the Baltic provinces.
For Russians there was not a glimmering hope of reform.
A great extension of territory was effected in Central Asia,
and the influence of Russia in European affairs was increased
by the conclusion of an alliance with France. Alexander
III was a sturdy soldier of limited intelligence, but with a
strong sense of his duty as an autocrat and a curious faith
in a blend of faded Muscovite romanticism with the virtues
of modern artillery and strategical railways.
Alexander III died in 1894, and the autocracy outlived
him by eleven years. During the early years of the reign
of the present Emperor Nicholas II, there were no outward
I ;> ■
: .>«-
{'. 4
,i .»-*-
THE EMPRESS AND THE TSAREVICH
The Growth of Russia 49
symptoms of the approaching change. The policy of Russifi-
cation was continued and was applied with great vigour to
Finland where, under the shelter of the autono-
Nicholas II. mous rights, maintained in their integrity by
Alexander I and his successors, a stubborn
and capable people had developed an interesting culture of its
own. The Minister of Finance, Count Witte, a man with a
keen modern business mind, tried to give a new lease of life
to the autocratic and bureaucratic system by measures of a
purely technical character, such as railway construction,
the artificial promotion of industrial enterprises, and a reform
of the monetary system by the establishment of the gold
standard. But the Russia that made possible an autocracy
was quietly slipping away. Strategical railways were arousing
villages from their sleep, and bringing them to rapidly-growing
capitals. Factory chimneys had risen up in clusters at
various points on the plain. In the region of the Don there
was a Black Country of mines and foundries. During the
second half of the century, Poland, the Moscow region, Riga
and St. Petersburg, had become important manufacturing
centres, and millions of peasants were abandoning their
homespun for the cheap cotton goods which all kinds of
enterprising middlemen, from the anglicised wholesale dealer
to the old-fashioned bearded merchant in a caftan and the
Tartar pedlar, hawked over the plain from Reval to Vlad-
ivostok. With the increase of population the land allotments
of the Emancipation period had grown too small, and the
peasantry were restless and discontented. The number of
schools had little by little increased, and new ideas were
slowly finding their way into the masses. The educated
classes were gradually recovering from the apathy into which
they had sunk during the eighties. The famine of 1892 was
a sharp call to compassion, and eager bands of helpers illus-
trious and obscure— Tolstoy, side by side with a village
schoolmistress — hastened to relieve the starving peasants of
the Volga region. The growth of industry modified the
50 Russia of the Russians
views of the Socialist groups. In the nineties, Social Demo-
crats made their appearance, and attacking the older school
of Populist Socialists who pinned their faith to the peasantry,
concentrated all their efforts on agitation among the factory
workmen. The Zemstvo Liberals groped their way towards
organisation, and in 1902 founded in Stuttgart a Liberal
organ of the type of the Kolokol under the editorship of Peter
Struve. A Social Revolutionary party was founded in 1900,
and both Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries formed
organisations abroad among the hundreds who had at one
time or other escaped from police repression in their native
land for political reasons, smuggled their literature into
Russia, and carried on conspirative propaganda amongst the
workmen and peasantry, and the students in the Univer-
sities and technical schools. Terrorist action was renewed
in the early years of the present century, and the political
police scented revolution everywhere.
But revolutionary activity was very slight considering the
vast extent of the Empire, and on the surface things were
quiet. President Faure and President Loubet
Alll ^ r n a c n e ce with came to St. Petersburg, and the Emperor
Nicholas went to France, and the alliance
between France and Russia was firmly cemented. M. Witte
tried to swell the exchequer and diminish drinking by estab-
lishing a State brandy monopoly. There was a movement
to the Far East. The Trans-Siberian railway was completed,
Russian troops occupied Manchuria, and a Russian naval
base was established at Port Arther. But it was just this
movement of expansion when internal conditions were unstable
that led to disaster. In January, 1904, Japan declared war
on Russia, and in the war that followed Russia suffered an
unparalleled series of defeats. The war let loose all the forces
of discontent at home. While Russian armies retired step
by step before the Japanese in Manchuria, a revolutionary
movement rapidly developed in the centre of the Empire.
It began with the assassination of the Minister of the Interior
The Growth of Russia 51
Plehve, in July, 1904 ; it received a tremendous impetus from
the shooting down of workmen on Red Sunday, June 22nd,
1905, in St. Petersburg, and after the conclusion of peace in
August it culminated in a general strike throughout Russia.
The strike was brought to an end by the promulgation on
October 30th, 1905, of that manifesto by which the Emperor
limited his power, affirmed the principles of civil liberty, and
declared that thenceforward no law should be valid without
the consent of an elective National Assembly. This manifesto
marked the end of a historical epoch and the beginning of a
new era of development. It was an expression of the
formal abolition of the autocracy and the establishment of
constitutional government in Russia.
CHAPTER II
THE BUREAUCRACY AND THE CONSTITUTION
During the last few years Russia has been absorbed in a
struggle between bureaucracy and constitutionalism. The
struggle is not yet over. Its forms change
Conflict of from year to year. It becomes more complex
Ideals* anc ^ more profound. There has been nothing
quite like it in all the world's history. Some
of its phases may be iUustrated from the history of other
European countries, but references to the French Revolution,
to the Italian Risorgimento, or to the establishment of repre-
sentative institutions in Germany, will not explain the Russian
struggle. The Russian constitutional movement was preceded
by similar movements on the Continent of Europe, in Germany
and in Austria, though it lagged nearly three-quarters of a
century behind these. In its turn it gave an impulse to
constitutional movements in the East, first in Persia, then
in Turkey, and last of all in China. But, as is well known,
the promulgation of constitutions in Eastern countries has
not been followed by such striking and indubitable progress
as was anticipated ; has in fact, in some cases, served only
the more clearly to reveal how deeply these countries were
sunk in decay. And then again the experience of the last
few years has shown that on the European continent, in
America, and in England itself, constitutional government,
though obviously a tremendous advance on absolutism, is
not such a simple and all-sufficing remedy for the ills of the
body politic as it seemed fifty years ago. Russia is in the
extraordinarily difficult position of having to deal at once
with the problems of East and West. She has to make up
for lost time in the adoption of European institutions, at
a moment when Europe itself is trying to adapt them to more
52
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 53
complex social conditions. And she has to tide over that
most painful of all periods when constitutional principles
have not acquired energy enough to transform the body
politic, but serve simply to lay bare the havoc wrought by
centuries of despotic government. It is true that the pro-
mulgation of the Constitutional Manifesto in 1905 marked
the beginning of a new era for Russia. But the early years
of the new era have brought even more acute suffering than
did the later years of the old, just as a latent disease becomes
more violent when it finds its way into the open. The remedy
that began by bringing the disease to the surface will gradually
effect a recovery. But the process involves shocks, and
constant relapses, and intense pain. And the subject of this
process is not a tiny Belgium, or an island in the midst of the
sea, or a comfortably-sized Germany, but an immense Empire
with a population of 160 millions, and watchful enemies on
her Eastern and Western frontiers. Revolution and reaction,
liberty and repression, all the words with which we are accus-
tomed to express phases of the struggle for representative
government have acquired in the vast sweep of the Russian
constitutional movement a hundred new connotations and
implications. There is nothing simple here, nothing to which
justice can be done by familiar and hackneyed phrases.
The main issue, however, is clear. The struggle is being
waged between the bureaucracy and constitutionalism. But
what is the bureaucracy ? Literally, it is rule by means of
bureaux or Government offices. But there are Government
offices in every country, and the distinction between a civil
service and a bureaucracy is that the former is subject to
control while the latter is not. A bureaucrat may be a per-
fectly reasonable, capable and hard-working being in so far
as he is a civil servant, but in so far as he exercises the power
of the State arbitrarily and irresponsibly he can, and human
nature being what it is, very likely will do a very great deal
of harm. The Russian State has been held together very
largely owing to the fact that the highly organised civil service
54 Russia of the Russians
which carries on the business of administration was by no
means wholly incompetent, and did a certain amount of
useful work every day of the year. What very nearly ruined
the State completely was the fact that the total absence of
popular control over the bureaucracy set a premium on
incompetence and dishonesty, and encouraged the worst
forms of exploitation. It would seem quite simple to remedy
matters by putting the bureaucracy under popular control
and giving the people, through its elected representatives,
a voice in legislation. But the very bigness of Russia makes
the application of such a remedy difficult, because nowhere
in the world has a highly-centralised bureaucracy had at its
uncontrolled disposal such a vast territory and such an
enormous extent of political power. It is true that the
bureaucracy exercised power in the name of the Monarch.
But in practice this delegated dominance was hardly dis-
tinguishable from original power, and an ispravnik or district
Chief of Police in Siberia wrought his will on the population
with unchallenged authority. The task of bringing under
popular control such an immense and complex organisation
with such a tangled variety of personal interests and such a
heavy weight of tradition behind it, would have been almost
a hopeless one if the bureaucracy had been thoroughly efficient.
But a bureaucracy naturally tends to collapse under the
burden of its own corruption, and the demonstration of
bureaucratic incompetence and corruption given in the
Russo-Japanese war facilitated the task of the reformers.
It would be quite wrong to say that the Russian Civil Service
is wholly composed of bureaucrats pure and simple. There
are bureaucrats, a great many of them, and
The Civil there are also a number of Government
employees who to-day are more or less tinged
with the bureaucratic spirit, but to-morrow would do their
duty just as well or even better if a Constitutional regime
were in full swing. The Russian Government Service, taken
as a whole, includes a large number of interesting types,
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 55
from elegant men of the world to that pettifogging Dryasdust
familiarly known as a " Chancellery rat," from the rough
red-faced police captain to the mild-mannered bespectacled
excise clerk, from the dried-up martinet at the head of a
St. Petersburg department to the slow-moving, long-haired
country postmaster. Governors, senators, clerks of court,
tax collectors, school-inspectors, telegraph clerks, customs
officials, wardens of the peasantry, heads of consistories,
all are engaged in the business of the Empire, all are
formally in the service of the Tsar. It is a State in
uniform. The very schoolboys wear uniform, and even
high-school girls have to wear brown dresses and brown
aprons. Ministers wear uniforms, not in the routine of
work in St. Petersburg, but on State occasions and when
they travel about the country. Judges wear uniforms, and
so do Government engineers and land-surveyors, and a
host of other people whose salary filters down through many
channels from the St. Petersburg Treasury. Brass buttons
and peaked caps, peaked caps and brass buttons, uniforms
with blue, red, or white facings meet the eye with weari-
some monotony from end to end of the Empire, from the
Pacific to the Danube. A Russian may wear uniform his
whole life long. As a little boy of eight he goes proudly
off to a preparatory school in a long grey overcoat, reaching
almost to the ground, and in a broad-crowned cap with the
peak tilted over his snub nose. When school days are over
he dons the uniform of a student, and after a few years at
University or Technical College, enters a Ministry and puts
on one of the many official uniforms. The years pass, he
is gradually promoted, and at fifty he is trudging in uniform
with portfolio under his arm to his Ministry, just as with
bag on shoulders he tramped to school when he was a little
boy of eight.
All the Government officials are Chinovniks, that is to say,
each of them stands in a definite cMn, or rank. Peter the
Great established an order of promotion called the Tabel
5— (2400)
56 Russia of the Russians
Rangov, or Table of Ranks, and this order is in force to the
present day. Once a man is drawn into the subtle mech-
anism of the Table of Ranks he may go on
How the from grade to grade with hardly an effort on
is Worked^ ^ s P ai "t> by the mere fact of existing and
growing wrinkled and grey-haired. When he
enters the Government service he receives a paper called
the formuliarny spisok or Formular List, in which the events
of his life are noted down from year to year — his appointment
to a particular table in the Ministry of Justice, his marriage,
the birth of his children, his leave, his illnesses, his appoint-
ment to a commission or committee, his despatch on special
service, and then the long series of decorations and promotions,
various degrees of the Order of St. Anne, St. Stanislav, St.
Vladimir, and it may be high up on the last rungs of the
bureaucratic ladder such coveted decorations as the Order
of St. Andrew, or even the White Eagle. The orders are a
reward for good service. But the chins, or grades, need not
necessarily be so. A chinovnik may be promoted from
grade to grade simply for " having served the due term of
years," as the phrase is, but his promotion may be hastened
through favour in high places or in recognition of special
diligence or ability. The names of grades have no meaning
except as indicating the grade. They are the same throughout
the civil service, and give no suggestion of the office held
by the possessor. They were originally adapted from German
titles, and look imposing when re-translated into German.
Thus the grade of nadvorny sovietnik is not a particularly
high one, but when it appears in German as Hofrat, or Court
Councillor, the impression is given that the possessor is a
personage of considerable importance. But the really impor-
tant chins are that of Staatsky Sovietnik, which is perhaps
not so important as it looks in its German guise of Staatsrath,
or Councillor of State, but seems to secure a man against
undue caprices on the part of Fortune, and to invest him
with an air of respectability ; and then the grades that make
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 57
the man who attains to them a noble if he is not one by birth.
There is a chin that conveys personal nobility, and the chin
of dieistvitelny staatsky sovietnik, or Real State Councillor,
conveys hereditary nobility. In this way the ranks of the
gentry are constantly recruited from the bureaucracy, and
the traditional connection between rank and Government
service is maintained in actual practice. The grade of Real
State Councillor also conveys the rank of a general in the
Civil Service and the title of Excellency. The average chin-
ovnik thinks himself happy if he reaches such an exalted
chin as this. Most professors become Real State Councillors
by virtue of length of service, and it sounds odd to hear a
stooping, frock-coated gentleman who is distinguished as an
able lecturer on mediaeval history, spoken of as a general.
The grades of Secret Councillor and Real State Councillor
are reserved either for very old or for very distinguished
members of the Civil Service, for ministers and ambassadors,
and the like.
The system of grades is one of the forces that hold the
bureaucracy together. It secures a certain uniformity of
temper, tendency and aim. Russians are the most demo-
cratic people in the world, but this carefully adjusted system
of grades, decorations, money premiums and, to close with,
pensions, corresponding to the chin attained, appeals to an
ineradicable human instinct for outward symbols of position,
security and distinction, and makes of the bureaucracy a
world apart, a world in which the interests of all the members
are interwoven. It is curious how mortified even a Radical
magistrate will be if his name fails to appear among the Real
State Councillors in the annual promotion list, and, on the
other hand, with what unalloyed pleasure he receives con-
gratulations if he has been given the coveted grade after all.
But there is another very characteristic feature of the
bureaucracy, and that is its extraordinary centralisation.
From the big dreary-looking yellow or brown buildings in
St. Petersburg, in which the Ministries are housed, currents
58 Russia of the Russians
of authority, of directive energy go forth to all the ends of
the great Empire in the form of telegrams or occasional oral
messages by special couriers, but above all in the form of
endless '' papers." Pens scratch, typewriters click, clerks
lay blue covers full of papers before the " head of the table " ;
the " head of the table " sends them to the " head of the
department," to the Assistant Minister, if need be, and in
the more important cases, the Assistant Minister to the
Minister. Then back go the papers again with signatures
appended, down through various grades for despatch to a
judge, to another department, to a Governor, to a chinovnik
on special service, or to some petitioner from the world without.
Incoming and outgoing papers are the systole and diastole
of the Chancelleries. All sorts of documents go under the
general name of bumaga or "paper," from a warrant for
arrest to a report on a projected railway, or a notification of
taxes due. There are doklady or reports, and otnoshenia or
communications between ^officials of equal rank, and donesenia
or statements made to superiors, predpisania instructions
or orders, and proshenia, applications or petitions. These,
and a hundred others besides, are all " Papers," and there is
a special style for each of them, and a general dry and formal
style for all of them known as the " Chancellery Style," which
permeates Russian public life, and creeps into private letters
and concert programmes, and newspaper articles, and into
the very love-making of telegraph clerks waiting for trains
on wayside stations. The " papers," their colour, the stamps
upon them, their style, create an immense uniformity of
mental content, and tend to level down the striking differences
that exist between say, the Tartar policemaster in a town
on the Caspian Sea, and the son of a Russian priest who serves
as a clerk in the financial department in Tver. It is extra-
ordinary discipline. The lack of variety in the system
increases its hold on all its members. There are hardly any
of the curious divergencies and inconsistencies of which the
English administrative system is so full, hardly any quaint
. The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 59
anachronisms left to linger on because of some wise use they
have for the affections. There are certain inevitable modi-
fications in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, in Bessarabia and
in Siberia, Poland and the Baltic Provinces. But, generally
speaking, the system as outlined in mathematical order on
smooth white paper, is embodied with surprising accuracy
in the network of institutions that cover the great plain
from limit to limit. Authority is delegated from the
big yellow Ministries in St. Petersburg to the dreary
white buildings in the head towns of the governments or
territories into which the whole Empire is mapped out,
and from the government towns to the head towns of
the districts into which each government is divided, and
then down to the smallest towns and to the Wardens of
the Peasantry. The uniformity of it all is both imposing
and depressing, and as wearying as the inevitable red-
capped stationmaster and brown-coated gendarme on
every one of the scores of railway stations between Wirballen
and Harbin.
The integrity and uniformity of the bureaucratic system
is maintained, the system is held in its framework, so to speak,
by means of the army. The army, in its turn, by means of
the conscript system, subjects almost the whole male popula-
tion to a uniform discipline, levels down, for a time at any
rate, the distinctions between various regions and various
nationalities, and serves as a most potent means of Russifica-
tion. Russification, indeed, is not the word, though it is the
Russian language that is used in the process, for it is not the
interests of the Russian people that are primarily in question
but the interests of the State. It is a moulding of all the
human material of the Empire upon one State pattern, a
persistent elimination of divergencies, a grandiose attempt
to subordinate all the wayward impulses of 160 millions of
human beings to one common aim unintelligible to the mass.
The army supplies the clamps by which the vast mechanism
of the bureaucracy is held in position.
60 Russia of the Russians
But it is through the police that the bureaucracy carries
out its function of maintaining order. And the police have
of late years assumed an overweening impor-
The Police. tance in the State because the bureaucracy
has constantly tended more and more to limit
its functions to the maintenance of order. It has subordinated
everything to this end. It has become immensely suspicious.
The very success, the very efficiency of the bureaucracy has
been its ruin. In so far as it governed well, administered
justice, prevented crime, promoted education, built roads
and railways, and furthered trade, it encouraged individual
initiative, fostered the desire for liberty. And at the same
time it opened the eyes of many to its own corruption, to
the depredations on the national wealth and welfare carried
on under the veil of order, strict uniformity and long-armed
discipline. On both occasions when the clamps were loosened,
when the army was defeated in the Crimea in 1854-5, and in
Manchuria fifty years afterwards, the evils of the bureaucracy
were vividly revealed, the system almost fell asunder.
Almost, but not quite. For after the Crimean War reforms
were effected and the system was modernised, and again
after the Japanese war reforms were granted and a further
attempt was made at modernisation. But on each occasion
concessions were followed by a reassertion of bureaucratic
authority by means of the police. The nineteenth century
was a century of movement, even in Russia. The emancipa-
tion of the serfs meant the freeing of an enormous amount
of pent-up energy of economic development, it aroused a
hum of fresh and vigorous movement all over the Empire.
But for that strange complexity of widely extended, exclusive
interests for which the bureaucracy stands, and for that
rigid external uniformity which is the aim of its efforts, move-
ment was dangerous. The bureaucracy took fright at the
new, high-spirited movement of the sixties and, instead of
steadily promoting economic and educational development,
set to work to devise a system of checks. It tried to render
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 61
its own reforms innocuous, set bureaucratic safeguards on
its own judicial system, and bound and weakened those
Zemstvos, or elective County Councils, which impaired the
integrity of the bureaucratic system by exerting the functions
of local government in thirty-four governments of European
Russia. And the maintenance of order interpreted as the
prevention of movement became the bureaucracy's prime
care.
The population increased rapidly, trade grew, factories
arose, a labour movement came into being. The connection
with Europe became closer and more vital, and through the
connecting tissue the swift beating of the pulse of the West
was felt in Russia. The progressive movement gathered
strength. Checked overground it went underground, and
became revolutionary and terrorist. The terrorist movement,
and more particularly the assassination of Alexander II,
heightened the fears of the bureaucracy. The whole nation
became suspect ; sedition was scented everywhere ; the
police gained influence and authority, and the application of
the term " political crime " to almost all forms of denial of
the autocracy afforded an extraordinarily wide field for the
exercise of repressive measures. That is why the bureaucracy
came to be chiefly impersonated in a modernised and highly
organised police system. That is why bureaucratic admin-
istration came to be so aggressively prohibitive of progress,
and why gendarmes and prefects, and policemasters and
ispravniks (heads of district police), and the Okhrana or
Political Police, and detectives of various kinds came to occupy
such a prominent position in the forefront of Russian public
life. It was the rigid centralisation, the exclusiveness of the
bureaucracy, the extremely wide interpretation of the term
" political crime " and the extraordinary powers given to
the police that made the bureaucratic system particularly
hard to bear at a time when thought was awakening, and the
economic and intellectual energies of the nation were straining
for free development.
62 Russia of the Russians
There were alleviating circumstances, of course. If the
German conceptions which entered so largely into the bureau-
cratic system had been put into practice with truly German
industry and rigidity, there would simply have been no
breathing-space at all. But sheer native indolence and good
nature often made officials wink at breaches of the law, and
even corruption had its milder- aspects, for while bribery gave
frequent occasion for extortion and blackmail, it often protected
the feeble against unendurable oppression. Then the fact
that the members of the * bureaucracy were human beings
with kith and kin in the world outside counted for a great
deal. Revolutionaries and Constitutionalists often found it
possible to secure through relatives " protection " in high
places. Influential persons often ' begged "or ' bustled
about," as the saying is, for those in trouble, and this through
all grades of the bureaucracy. It might easily happen that
the sister or the son of a Governor or Crown Prosecutor was
a revolutionary. There was one other fact that for a time
tended to keep the bureaucracy in touch with the general
life of the nation. Most of the country gentry were employed
in the Government Service, and after the sixties there was
a liberal and humane movement amongst the gentry, which
affected the bureaucracy. But members of the gentry
tended to let their land slip out of their possession, and to
become entirely dependent on Government service. And
for this reason the bureaucracy became more and more a
caste apart, suspicious of the rest of the nation, dry and hard,
It was at the beginning of the twentieth century, under
the iron rule of the Minister of the Interior, Plehve, that the
bureaucracy most distinctly assumed the form of a system
of rigid police control. Plehve displayed consummate art
and extraordinarily singleness of aim in the application of
all the means of repression. He was determined to crush
the opposition movement in all its forms — the Constitutional
movement which was centred in an organisation composed
chiefly of members of the Zemstvos, or County Councils, and
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 63
found expression in the publication of a Liberal organ, called
Osvobozhdenie (Liberation) in Stuttgart, the labour movement
which led to a number of strikes, chiefly in Southern Russia,
and was furthered by the Socialist parties having their centre
in Switzerland, and the terrorist movement maintained by
the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Plehve strengthened the
Political Police, developed the detective system, maintained
an extremely strict censorship, and created an atmosphere
of oppressive stillness in the country. During his term of
office the war with Japan broke out, and although Plehve
advocated war in the hope that it would divert the growing
forces of internal discontent, the war had the reverse effect of
fanning the flame of the constitutional agitation. It was
at this time that a series of events began which demand here
a brief review, for apart from them the present position is
wholly unintelligible.
In July, 1904, shortly after the Japanese war began, Plehve
was murdered by the bomb of an assassin. The Government
for a time relaxed its severity, and the Con-
Co r s -i t ^ tlonal stitutional agitation among the educated
Agitation. ° b
classes had greater scope. In Movember,
with the tacit permission of the Government, a conference
of leading Zemstvo, or County Council workers, was held in
St. Petersburg, and passed resolutions affirming the necessity
of civil liberty and the establishment of representative institu-
tions. Then a strange movement began among the working
men of St. Petersburg. A priest named Gapon organised
Working-men's Clubs on behalf of the Government, with the
object of combating the conspirative Socialist organisations.
But he made use of the influence he had gained and of the
unrest caused by the war, and by the echoes of the con-
stitutional agitation to place himself at the head of a workmen's
movement, the aim of which was directly to petition the Tsar
to grant his people liberty. On the morning of January 22nd,
1905, the workmen in the various districts in the outskirts
of St. Petersburg formed in procession to march to the Winter
64 Russia of the Russians
Palace and present their petition to the Emperor. But the
Emperor did not appear.
It was a beautiful winter morning, with a sharp frost and
a sun brilliantly shining from a pale-blue sky upon the white
expanse of the Neva and the snow-covered roofs and streets
of the city. Down the Nevsky Prospect walked unceasingly
with set, firm faces, working men, young and old, in black
winter overcoats and black lambskin caps. There was some-
thing uncanny in their intentness. In the great white square
before the Winter Palace a bivouac fire was burning, and
around it soldiers were boxing to keep themselves warm.
The throng from the Nevsky was held back from the Square
by a line of dragoons, who from time to time charged down
the sidewalks and sent the throng scattering. On the North
side of the Neva, near the Finland Station, rifles were stacked
and soldiers stood waiting. Near the fortress of St. Peter
and St. Paul, before the oldest of the St. Petersburg churches,
a score of mounted dragoons were drawn up in line, com-
manding the square. Past the People's Palace, a procession
came marching, workmen in black, intent and solemn, a stu-
dent or two, and two or three women. They sang a little
and then moved silently. They entered the square near the
fortress. There was a bugle-call from the opposite side, but
they marched on. There was a warning volley, and then
three volleys of loaded cartridge. With shouts and cries
the procession scattered, and the dead and wounded lay
upon the snow. So all the processions were met and scattered,
that led by Gapon among the rest.
Near the Winter Palace the throng grew and pressed on
and on. Then the troops fired, bringing down little boys
perched on the trees in a neighbouring public
Sunda garden and killing and wounding many men
and women. A little further up the Nevsky
Prospect, near the Police Bridge, the troops again fired.
Again killed and wounded, again groans and cries, and a terror-
stricken scattering crowd spreading indignation throughout
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 65
the city. A sleigh drove swiftly up the Nevsky followed
by half-a-dozen workmen running with bare heads and
crossing themselves, some weeping. In the sleigh sat a youth
holding in his arms a student, dead, his face one gaping
wound. Three or four Cossacks came galloping up on horse-
back, pulled rein, looked at the sleigh, then rode on with
a jeering laugh. The sun set in a roseate sky, the evening fell,
crowds wandered about the streets with helpless imprecations,
the wounded were brought to the hospitals or cared for in
private houses. Cossacks and dragoons guarded the Govern-
ment buildings, and from time to time charged down the
Nevsky, driving loiterers before them like chaff before the
wind. It is not known to a certainty to this day how many
hundreds were killed on that terrible Sunday when the
workmen set out to petition the Tsar for liberty.
That day turned trust into bitterness, and the longing
for justice into a desperate endeavour. A revolutionary
movement leapt from city to city, from town
Th Rebe[fion ° f to town, till all the towns of the Empire
were in a ferment, and unrest spread even to
remote villages. Workmen went out on strike, police raids i^
and arrests became the order of the day. Streets were patrolled
by Cossacks. In Warsaw the troops charged and fired on
a procession of working-men. Here and there bombs were
thrown at police officials and other representatives of the
Government. Manufacturers, members of municipal councils,
doctors, lawyers and professors held meetings, conferences
and congresses to devise a remedy for the situation. A
Congress of lawyers, and later a Congress of literary men, held
secretly in St. Petersburg, formulated demands for the estab-
lishment of a democratic system of government. In April
an important Congress of Zemstvo Representatives, held
in Moscow in various private houses in defiance of the pro-
hibition of the police, set to work to give point and detail to
the demand of the Liberal gentry for a Constitution. It
became a custom to hold Liberal meetings in secret with the
66 Russia of the Russians
knowledge that Cossacks were waiting around the corner.
And somehow people of a sudden found their tongues, lost
that fear of open speech which had become habitual under
the Plehve regime, and when they spoke openly in trains and
public places they spoke much of the Constitution and little
of the war that was bringing defeat after defeat. Only the
shock of the Tsusima disaster deepened a growing sense of
imminent danger to the State, and caused the Zemstvo men
to assemble hastily again in July, and to send a deputation
to the Emperor, to implore him to put an end to the bureau-
catic system and establish representative government. Up
till then there had been on the part of the Government only
a few faint signs of reluctant yielding, vague promises, the
appointment of Commissions to draft reforms. In reply to
the Zemstvo deputation (June 19th) the Tsar said definitely :
" My will, the will of the Emperor to convene a National
Assembly, is unshakable. I am daily watching over this.
My will shall be carried out."
Ten days afterwards Odessa was the scene of a naval mutiny.
Workmen struck, crowds of wharf -labourers burned down
goods-sheds, stores and country houses. There were san-
guinary conflicts with the troops. The space around the
harbour was covered with a smoking heap of ruins. Then
up over the blue sunlit expanse of waters, across which
argonauts had once sailed in search of the Golden Fleece, a
battleship came swiftly steaming. The battleship, the Prince
Polemkin, was in charge of a mutinous crew. They cast
anchor before the city and warned the authorities to refrain
from interfering with the burial of their comrade who had
been killed by an officer. Their comrade was buried, and
thousands of the inhabitants of Odessa attended the funeral.
Three or four of the sailors were arrested. The Potemkin
fired shots into the city and the sailors were released. The
mutiny spread to two other vessels. The mutineers held
the authorities paralysed. The Admiral commanding the
Black Sea fleet came up with the rest of the squadron, but
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 67
did not venture to take strong measures. The Potemkin,
after taking provisions, left Odessa and put in at Constanza
in Roumania. Here she was disarmed, and most of the
mutineers, after aimless wanderings in foreign lands, one by
one returned to Russia, drawn by invincible home-sickness,
and were seized and punished, some by death, and some
by exile.
There were mutinies in Libau and Kronstadt and political
strikes ; bomb-throwing and demonstrations did not cease
throughout the land. On August 9th an Imperial Decree
was promulgated constituting a National Representative
Assembly with Consultative Powers. But this concession
did not check the growing agitation. The war came to an
end. The Peace of Portsmouth was concluded in August.
When M. Witte after signing it returned to Russia he was
the man of the hour. He received the title of Count, and
united all the Ministers in a Cabinet of which be became the
first Premier. The unrest grew, and toward the end of
October culminated in a general strike of a character un-
paralleled. The final impetus was given by the St. Petersburg
rail way -men, who struck by mistake in consequence of the
receipt of false information from Moscow. The strike spread
to all the railways of the Empire. On all that network of
lines which maintains communication between the ends
of the great plain traffic came to a standstill. Trains stopped
at wayside stations. Passengers bivouacked or pursued
their journey in hired carriages. The busy hum and thunder-
ous rattle of the great city stations, their pride in the conquest
of distance yielded suddenly to a chilly, faint-hearted silence.
One by one porters, newsboys, book-keepers, ticket-clerks
crept away. Cab-drivers deserted their ranks before the
stations, disconsolate, to seek chance fares at street corners.
At such a moment it was a simple and natural thing that the
factory employees should strike once more. Agitation and
persuasion were hardly needed. And the strange impulse
spread, the impulse to cease from all action, to refrain even
68 Russia of the Russians
from such support of the old system as was involved in the
earning of one's bread, till the word of change should come.
Shop assistants put on their coats and went wandering aim-
lessly up and down the streets in search of liberty. The
clerks in city offices laid aside their pens and waited. Teachers
ceased to teach, and school children had unexpected holidays.
Lawyers ceased to plead, and even unemotional city magis-
trates were infected by the strange unrest and ceased to judge
between landlords and tenants, or to pass sentence on the
drunk and disorderly until the word of a new time had been
spoken. The provision shops remained open and the people
ate and drank. But all the myriad currents of effort and
emotion which constitute the daily life of a great city had
been suddenly simplified, reduced to one single emotion of
silent expectancy, menacing because of its vastness, because
of its amazing spontaneity. Organisation played only the
most trifling part in the strike. It was the spontaneous
expression of a general desire, perhaps possible in such a form
only in a country where industry and the business of living
generally are loosely organised. There was something
awe-inspiring in this strange negative assertion of the general
will.
Cossacks uneasily patrolled the streets of St. Petersburg.
No one knew how long the strange silence would last or what
it portended. The University building was crowded night
after night with people eager to hear fitting words for the
strange emotions that were oppressing them. The floors of
the University groaned under the weight of the packed
masses ; the students joined hands and formed living barriers
to guide the surging stream up staircases and along corridors.
Revolutionary songs were sung, but they left perplexity and
fear hanging in the air. The police were helpless. Arrests
were of no avail. Who could arrest this vast emotion ?
On the third evening of the strike, that is, on October 30th,
news came from Tsarskoe Selo and was telegraphed abroad.
The Tsar had granted a Constitution. He had signed a
/
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 69
manifesto declaring that no law should be valid without the
consent of the Duma, and affirming the principles of liberty
of speech, of the Press, of assembly and
A Granted* 1011 associat ion, and also the principle of personal
immunity. The news was known abroad before
it was generally known in St. Petersburg. In the evening
a few copies of the Manifesto were distributed. Towards
midnight a faint sound of singing broke the brooding silence
of the Nevsky. The Cossack patrols reined up their horses
in vague alarm. A little procession of students came marching
down the Prospect, doubting and wondering wayfarers joined
them, Cossack patrols formed a cautious and puzzled escort.
The procession crossed the bridge and approached the dimly
looming mass of the University buildings. Out of the darkness
of the University square Cossacks came galloping and checked
the march. A police officer appeared and forbade entrance
to the University. A student handed him a copy of the
Manifesto. In the glimmering light of a street-lamp, vaguely
revealing the Cossacks leaning down from their saddles and
the thin pale faces of students, both men and women, the
police officer read in a hard, dry voice the Manifesto. " Liberty
of speech " was one of the phrases he read, and then he opened
the door of the University Courtyard, the students entered,
somebody made a speech, there was cheering, and the little
company dispersed.
Next day the city gave itself over to rejoicing, a strange
morbid kind of rejoicing that was full of bitterness and fore-
boding. There were endless processions with red flags, and
the interminable singing of the Russian revolutionary
Marseillaise, open-air meetings, fierce ejaculations, speeches
bitter and resentful, never simply joyful, sighs of relief that
the immediate tension was over, but no powerful controlling
voice, no leader to gather up all the vague, diffuse popular
emotion of the troubled time, to illuminate it, to direct it,
and make it the motive force of the new era just proclaimed
in the Imperial Manifesto. In default of a popular leader
70 Russia of the Russians
there was a disposition on the part of many to look to Count
Witte for guidance. But the Zemstvo men, the recognised
heads of the Constitutional movement, did not trust him.
He had to form a Cabinet of Government officials, he was
caught in the toils of bureaucratic tradition, and before he
had time to give effect to the principles of the Manifesto found
himself plunged into a systematic policy of repression, the
agent of which was the Minister of the Interior, Durnovo.
There was a period of irresolution, of halting between liberty
and oppression. In Kiev, Odessa, and other towns mobs,
aided by the soldiery, carried out terrible massacres of Jews
and intelligentsia. But in the Capitals, the Press was free,
and a Council of Workmen's Deputies, which sat in St.
Petersburg, wielded for a time an extraordinary authority.
Then the members of this Council were arrested and the Press
was checked. In the Baltic Provinces Lettish workmen and
peasants killed German landlords, and again and again lit
up a whole country-side with the lurid light of burning
mansions, bringing down at the end of the year terrible
retribution in the form of punitive expeditions. In Moscow
revolutionary groups threw up barricades in the streets, and
for several days lived in enjoyment of the virtual command
over half the city. At midday daily heavy guns were labori-
ously dragged up to demolish the barricades, and to make
ugly holes in houses where revolutionaries were supposed to
be lodged. The revolt was quelled by a regiment sent from
St. Petersburg, and punitive expeditions did their merciless
work along the railway lines in the neighbourhood of Moscow.
There were other revolts here and there, provisional so-called
republics were established in various towns, to be quickly
followed by the terrors of punitive expeditions, improvised
from among the troops returning from the war. The winter
dragged on wearily and heavily, but preparations were made
for the elections to the Duma. Parties were organised.
An electoral law giving the peasantry the preponderance of
voting powers was issued in March, and on the eve of the
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 71
assembling of the Duma, the principles of the October Mani-
festo were embodied in revised Fundamental Laws. The
elections returned a majority of Constitutional Democrats
or Cadets (so-called from the first letters of their title K D),
members of a party formed by a fusion of the leading group
of the Zemstvo Congress with groups of professional men
in the towns. There were also a large number of peasants,
most of whom joined a Labour Party which was organised in
the Duma. The Conservative and the Reactionary elements
in the country were almost unrepresented.
On a sunny May morning the Emperor received the members
of the first Russian Parliament in the great white hall of
the Winter Palace. On one side of the hall
The First were ran nr e d the deputies, stern and sober,
Parliament. . ° r . . , .
a few m frock-coats, many in jackets, and
the great majority of the peasants in simple peasant costume.
Opposite them were ranged courtiers, generals and admirals,
ministers, members of the Senate and the Council of State,
all gleaming in scarlet uniforms and gold lace. The Emperor
read an address in which he called the deputies " the best
men " of the country. The courtiers and dignitaries cheered
lustily, and a band played the National Anthem. But the
deputies looked on gloomily, and the peasants calculated how
much of the people's money had been spent in the purchase
of all the splendid uniforms. The first hostile note of the
session was struck there in the Winter Palace. The attempt
to reconcile the new institution with the traditional order
failed from the outset.
The deputies went by steamer up the sunlit river to the
Taurida Palace. A cheering crowd welcomed them at the
gates. In the hall of session, arranged in the form of an
amphitheatre, peasants, professors, landowners, and lawyers
noisily and exultingly took their seats, and in the afternoon
light, reflected through great windows from a garden jubilant
in its spring garment of green, they elected as their Speaker
a dignified professor from Moscow named Muromtsev, and
6 — (2400)
72 Russia of the Russians
listened to a short speech in which the veteran Zemstvo leader
Petrunkevich demanded as the pledge of complete recon-
ciliation between the Government and the nation a full
amnesty for all political offenders.
For seventy-two days the First Duma sat and debated in
the Taurida Palace. This period was one of open and declared
hostility between the Government and the Representative
Assembly. There was no moderating element on either side.
The Witte Cabinet had retired just before the opening of the
Duma, giving place to a Cabinet under the premiership of
an elderly and inactive dignitary named Goremykin, who
represented bureaucratic tradition pure and simple. In the
Parliament the Cadets, who in themselves represented liberal
and democratic constructive tendencies, were continually
overborne, and if not out-voted, were outvoiced by the more
domonstrative violent and aggressive left wing of the Duma,
the Labour and Socialist groups. The appearance of Ministers
in the Duma was the signal for fierce attacks on the
Government. The peasantry, the nationalities, clamoured for
immediate satisfaction of their demands. The fine promenade
hall of the Taurida Palace, once a ballroom, now a parlia-
mentary lobby, was continually ahum with disputes between
peasants, workmen, journalists and lawyers on land nation-
alisation, women's franchise, or the claims of the proletariat.
And apart from disputes there was a burning desire for mere
intercourse, an eagerness to compare notes, exchange experi-
ences, to revel in a new sense of kinship, brotherhood, unity,
to interpret the political and geographical unity of the Empire
in a passionate expression of national unity in the task of
liberation. But there was no real unity after all. The party
spirit grew apace, the deputies vented their passion on each
other, and the resounding echoes of the Duma's attacks on
the bureaucracy confusedly mingled with the sharp tones
of bitter party strife. The people looked to the Duma for
relief. Wild-looking peasants from remote governments
came up to the Duma with fantastic schemes for saving the
<
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04
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The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 73
Empire. But the Duma was helpless. It did not succeed
in affirming in Acts of Parliament even the most elementary
principles of civil liberty. And yet scores of Socialist organs all
over the country violently attacked it for failing at once to bring
the millenium. In the end the Government simply dissolved
the Duma. The majority of the deputies went to Viborg in
Finland, and thence issued an appeal to the people to defend
their rights by refusing to pay taxes or give recruits to the
army. This act proved to be a deplorable political blunder,
from which the Cadets in particular reaped bitter consequences.
No response was made by the country to the Viborg appeal, and
the new head of the Government, Stolypin, who, having ven-
tured as Minister of the Interior to recommend the dissolution
of the Duma, had been appointed Premier with the injunction to
carry the dissolution into effect, engaged in a policy of repression
even more energetic than that conducted by M. Durnovo.
The name of Stolypin stands for a very distinctly marked
and characteristic period of recent Russian history. This
period, lasting from July 21st, 1906, when
M. Stolypin. Stolypin became Premier till September, 1911,
when he was assassinated in Kiev, may be
described as the period of the reassertion of the bureaucratic
will. M. Stolypin probably did not aim definitely at the
complete restoration of the bureaucracy. He was not a
thorough bureaucrat by training or conviction. He was a
country gentleman and a provincial governor, and had had
no experience of the intricate ways of the St. Petersburg
Chancelleries until he was summoned from Saratov to be
Minister of the Interior in the Goremykin Cabinet. He was
not a man of theory ; there is no reason to believe that he
was an anti-constitutionalist in principle, and he was certainly
not a devotee of bureaucratic tradition. His main object
was to hold the Empire together under particularly trying
circumstances. He refused to see perplexities, and tried to
cut a Gordian knot. He took a simple view of the strange,
confused emotion that was agitating the country. He summed
74 Russia of the Russians
it all up as revolutionary, and proceeded to put it down.
Agrarian disturbances, terrorism, those forms of highway
robbery or expropriation into which the extreme forms of
revolutionary activity had degenerated, he suppressed by
the ruthless methods of the Field Court-Martial. Executions
became a normal feature of public life in a country in which
capital punishment has no place in the Criminal Code.
Stolypin had a second Duma elected, but the Second Duma
proved to be as uncompromising as the First, and far less
capable. The Premier brought about its dissolution, and in
spite of the provisions of the Constitution that no law should
be valid without the consent of the Duma, the electoral law
was changed by Imperial decree, so as to transfer the prepon-
derance of voting power from the peasantry to the landed
gentry. In the Third Duma, elected on the basis of the new
law, the Constitutional Democrats numbered less than three
score, the Labour and Socialist parties which had been so
prominent in the first two Dumas were represented by a mere
handful, while the majority consisted of Conservative
and Reactionary groups. The Centre was formed by a party
of Conservative Constitutionalists known as Octobrists,
who hovered dexterously on the borderline between
Constitutionalism and Bureaucracy.
For five years the Third Duma contrived to maintain a
shadowy existence in virtue of a curious policy of hide-and-
seek which the Octobrists, as represented by their leader,
the Moscow deputy, Guchkov, amicably played with the
Government, as represented by Stolypin. Both Stolypin
and Guchkov were men of spirit, but the effect of their co-
operation was to make the Duma a byword in the country
for spiritless compliance. It was characteristic of the Third
Duma that whenever it ventured clearly to assert a con-
stitutional principle it always surrendered it the moment the
assertion seemed to involve the danger of serious conflict
with the Government. But the cringing of the Third Duma
had a certain advantage. By bowing before the vehement
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 75
reassertion of bureaucratic and reactionary principle, it
prevented that total abolition of representative institutions
which again and again seemed inevitable. It established
for the representative assembly a certain tradition, a certain
customary right of existence. And that meant a great deal
at a moment when the nation, ill-organised, divided against
itself and yet eager to abolish the old system, was unable
to give effect to its desire. Perhaps the Third Duma was
the measure of the nation's actual strength. But while the
Duma examined the budget and passed various bills of
secondary importance — whatever progressive principles they
contained being afterwards almost invariably eliminated by
the Upper House, the Council of the Empire — the greater
part of the Empire remained under martial law, all the acts
of the administration were an ostentatious denial of the
principles of civil liberty, the evils of the bureaucratic system
made themselves felt with redoubled intensity — in fact the
Bureaucracy assumed a new aggressive character largely owing
to the force of Stolypin's personality, the strength of his will.
It was a strange position. Stolypin placed himself, his
energy, his decision of character, his freedom from hampering
bureaucratic routine at the service of the bureaucracy. The
bureaucracy acquired in him what it most needed, a will.
He tried to suppress the popular movement, and at the same
time to reinvigorate the bureaucracy by cleansing it of some
of its worst abuses, such as the wholesale taking of bribes.
He needed the Duma, in fact the Duma was indispensable
to him. His prestige was largely based on the fact that in
the Representative Assembly he appeared before the public
eye. He was a fine, vigorous-looking man, with black beard,
square shoulders and a determined glance. And he was an
excellent public speaker. He needed the Duma. Yet he
constantly discouraged the Duma's constitutional aspirations.
And as the years passed he tended to identify himself more
and more closely with the bureaucratic tradition, and in so
doing he lost his vigour, his initiative, that very energy of
76 Russia of the Russians
volition which made him so valuable to the supporters of the
older system. He was defeated again and again on questions
of primary importance by the extreme reactionary elements,
but he remained at his post. He had in fact lost his real
power before he was assassinated by Bogrov in September,
1911. And the very manner of his death revealed in a striking
and tragical form an abuse which had assumed far-reaching
dimensions during the period of Stolypin's premiership.
The assassin, Bogrov, was an agent of the Secret Police,
whose duty it was to protect exalted personages against
terrorist attacks. In combating the revolutionary movement
the Secret Police had been in the habit of employing agents
provocateurs, who associated with the revolutionaries, learned
their secrets, helped them to organise their plots, and at the
same time kept the police informed, so that at the critical
moment the conspirators could be arrested. The case of a
notorious agent provocateur named Azev, who had for years
been a member of the Social Revolutionary Committee and,
while serving the Secret Police had aided in the assassination
of the Minister of the Interior, Plehve, and the Grand Duke
Sergius Alexandrovich, had been the subject of an interpella-
tion in the Duma. Stolypin did not put a stop to this practice
even after the Azev exposure, and in the end he himself
became its victim. It was a tragic end to a strange career,
the most striking political career of recent times in Russia.
The Third Duma drifted peacefully to its appointed term,
and was dissolved in August, 1912. The Fourth Duma,
which assembled in October, was in most essentials a mere
copy of its predecessor, and for the present it is carrying on
a passive policy of marking time and waiting for things to
turn up. And in a sense it may be said that the whole
country is waiting, that the Government itself is waiting
and wondering ; nowhere does there seem to be a clear, definite
aim. The revolutionary movement has been long since
suppressed, there appears to be no object for the bureaucracy
to expend its repressive energy on. There is a constant,
M. STOLYPIN
(Late President of the Council of Minister )
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 77
irritating, petty persecution of individuals, groups and
institutions, and the inhibition on public initiative has not
been relaxed. And, on the other hand, there is an upward
movement in commerce and industry. Several years of
good harvests have restored the economic balance of the
country. Apart from politics, a steady process of Western-
isation is going on. A measure introduced by Stolypin,
providing for the gradual break-up of the village commune
and the acquirement by individual peasants of the proprietory
rights over their allotments of the communal land, has
led to profound changes in the rural districts, the exact
bearing of which it is yet early to determine. Life is going
its own ways, changing its forms independently of politics.
The years of tumult have affected so far only a slight change
in the political system, but they have brought about a
tremendous change in the mental attitude of the people.
A certain naivete, a patriarchal simplicity of outlook has
passed away. The Russian has suffered bitter disappoint-
ment and disillusionment, and for better or worse he is
becoming a modern man. And yet the Imperial problem
is not solved, the period of transition is not yet over. The
immense task of transforming into the highly complex unity
of a vigorous modern national organism, the outward and
simple political unity that has been attained as the result
of the gradual conquest of the great plain, is only half accom-
plished. And those who are interested in the welfare of the
Russian people can only earnestly hope that the process may
be completed without further catastrophe.
The result of the struggles of the last few years is that
Russia now has an Imperial Legislative Assembly, existing
side by side with the bureaucracy, but unable
Survey of to exert a thoroughgoing control. The
Recent Political , , , °., . , ,
Struggles. present system bears a transitional character.
The Duma is tolerated, but frequently
ignored. The menace of dissolution hangs over it constantly,
but the Duma has weathered seven extremely difficult years,
78 Russia of the Russians
and threats of its abolition and the complete restoration of
the autocracy are less frequently heard than they used to be.
It is hard to find a term to describe the present regime. In
official documents the word " Autocrat " is retained. Stolypin
avoided the word " Constitution," and spoke of the " reformed "
or " renovated system," and sometimes of the " representative
system." Perhaps the existing state of affairs might be
called a bureaucracy slightly tempered by constitutionalism.
At any rate, there is a Duma, a Parliament in Russia, and
this fact is in itself immensely important as a symbol of
achievement and a pledge of progress. The Duma is
enveloped in grey mists of disappointment. It can accom-
plish little. Its wishes, even its most modest wishes for
reform are thwarted. It is deferential, self-effacing. It
shrinks from asserting in any pronounced form its privileges
and powers. It has cultivated the art of self-protection by
mimicry ; it has assumed to a large extent the colour of its
bureaucratic environment. But even so the Duma represents
a principle of government absolutely distinct from that of
the bureaucracy, and its mere existence is a gain, an advance.
The Duma means that Russia has finally emerged from her
isolation, that she has definitely come into Europe, and that
whatever happens there can be no return to the past. When
even China has adopted a Constitution, the world has clearly
grown too small to permit of Russian bureaucratic
exclusiveness.
The Duma is composed of 442 members, elected from all
parts of the Empire, with the exception of Central Asia. It
is thus much smaller than the British Parlia-
The Duma ment ith it 67Q mem t, ers although it
Described. , , , „ ° .
directly represents a population of 150 millions
as compared with the 44 millions represented in the House
of Commons. The great majority of the deputies are Russians.
By the new electoral law, promulgated in 1907, after the
dissolution of the Second Duma, the number of deputies from
non-Russian regions was greatly reduced. The result is that
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 79
while a central, purely Russian government like Kursk, with
a population of two and a half millions returns eleven deputies,
and Tambov, with a population of three millions returns
twelve, Poland, with its eleven millions sends fourteen, of
whom two must be Russians, and Transcaucasia, with its
six and a quarter millions, sends seven deputies, of whom one
must be a Russian. The Duma is elected for five years, and
one Duma, the Third, lived out its full term. The electoral
system is complex, and in the large cities the electors are
divided into two classes according to property qualification.
Thus St. Petersburg returns six members, of whom three
are elected by the first class, or curia, and three by the second.
In the second class the qualification is occupancy of an apart-
ment or flat which gives a fairly wide and democratic franchise.
The first class includes wealthy property owners, and naturally
tends to be far more conservative than the second. Moscow
returns four members, two from the first and two from the
second class. Kiev and Odessa return one member from
each class, and in Warsaw the dividing factor is not a property
but a national line, the small Russian population being in
one class, the Poles and Jews in the other. The electoral
system in the cities is fairly simple, but while in St. Petersburg
and Moscow the voting is direct, that is to say, voters simply
elect their deputies, in Warsaw it is indirect, that is, voters
elect electors who in their turn elect the deputy. Outside
the big cities the system of indirect voting is developed to
such an extent as to make elections resemble walking through
a labyrinth. All sorts of groups first meet at different points
in a government or province to elect electors, then some of
these electors elect other electors in their turn, and finally,
the electors who remain after the straining process has been
completed assemble in the head town of the government
and elect the requisite number of deputies. In the final
elections in the government town there are all kinds of rivalries
and combinations between the various groups of big land-
owners and small landowners, priests and townsmen and
80 Russia of the Russians
peasants, all these group interests being intersected by party
and personal interests, and the whole complicated by the
administrative pressure which is exercised through all stages
of the elections. It is a strange process. The vote of the
sturdy peasant, Ivan Ivanov, is reduced to the faintest echo
of itself by the time that it has passed through all the stages
of its delegated progress, through the cantonal meeting, and
right up to the government assembly. After all, the system
is so calculated that, in the end, the big landowners are almost
certain to secure a majority, and the peasants returned are
usually those who seem to the landowners fairly safe. So
it happens that while the towns generally return Progressives
and the working-class communities Socialists, the provinces
return Conservatives of various shades, from the Conservative
Constitutionalists, or Octobrists, to the Reactionaries of the
Extreme Right. Russia being an agricultural country,
with towns few and far between, the Conservatives under
such conditions inevitably secure a majority and the
Progressives, forming the Opposition, remain in a perpetual
minority.
The Duma, being a new institution, is naturally formed on
foreign models, and there is nothing particularly Russian
about it, except that pretty Taurida Palace on the outskirts
of St. Petersburg in which it meets. The German arrangement
of parties prevails, the Conservatives sitting to the right of
the Speaker, and Liberals and Socialists to the left. Right
and Left thus connote political ideas, the Extreme Right
being Reactionaries and the Extreme Left Socialists, while
any tendency in a conservative or progressive direction is
described as a movement from left to right, or from right to
left, as the case may be. The parties themselves, Cadets or
Octobrists, for instance, may be divided into Right and Left
Wings ; thus if the Octobrists are Conservative Constitution-
alists, a right Octobrist will be more conservative than
constitutionalist, and a left Octobrist more constitutionalist
than conservative. To say that a deputy is " righting "
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 81
means that he is getting more conservative in his views :
to say that he is " lefting " means that he is growing more
radical. Left and Right are the political epithets most
frequently applied in Russia, and are very conveniently
elastic in their application at a moment when parties are
many, and normal conditions of party life have not yet been
established.
The business of the Duma is conducted by a body called,
as in Germany, the Praesidium, and consisting of a President,
or Speaker, two deputy Speakers, and a Secretary with his
assistants, who are all elected annually from among the
deputies. The apportionment of these offices among the
various parties causes a great deal of heartburning and strife.
The order of business is arranged by the Praesidium in con-
junction with the leaders of the parties grouped in an informal
body, known for a long time under the German name of
Seniorenconvent, but now described by a Russian term
meaning " Council of Elders." The President sits aloft in
a kind of box or tribune, and the Secretaries in smaller boxes
just in front of him. Deputies speak, not from their places,
but from a tribune in front of and a little lower than that of
the President. The Deputies are seated in an amphitheatre,
the various sectors of which from right to left are apportioned
to various parties. Parliamentary officials called pristavs,
distinguished by chains like those of aldermen, attend to
technical details such as the admission of visitors, the counting
of votes, and the distribution of papers. Ministers and
Assistant Ministers, when they come to Parliament, sit in a
box to the Speaker's right. The Press has one box in the'
hall of sitting and another upstairs ; there is a roomy visitors'
gallery, an Imperial Box in which one of the Grand Dukes
sometimes sits, and a Diplomatic Box. A splendid promenade
hall called the Catherine Hall, now serves the purposes of a
lobby, various rooms are reserved for committees and party
purposes. In the summer months the deputies relieve the
tedium of long sittings by wandering about in that part of
82 Russia of the Russians
the Taurida Park which is fenced oh for the Parliament, or
row in a little boat on a miniature lake. The Taurida Palace
is under the command of a general of gendarmes.
In the appearance of the deputies there is little to strike
the eye. The First and Second Dumas, which were more
democratic and represented a greater number of national
types than their successors, displayed a picturesque variety
of costume and feature. Now the monotony of ordinary
European frock-coats and jackets is only relieved by the
cassocks of the priests, by the kaftans of a few of the peasants,
and the skull-caps and long coats of one or two of the Tartar
deputies. Most of the faces are of an average Russian cast,
but on the left there are Poles and Tartars, and on the extreme
left a few swarthy Armenian and Georgian faces, while towards
the right there are bulky landowners from the backwoods
with thick lips and protruding lower jaw. The deputies
receive a salary of 4,000 roubles (£400) a year. Some of the
wealthy landowners come down to the House in their own
motor-cars or private carriages, but the majority come on foot
or in cheap cabs, or in a shabby little horse-car that maintains
a limp connection with the centre of the city. Outwardly
the Duma is becoming assimilated to bureaucratic St. Peters-
burg and has, it must be admitted, grown to be rather a dreary
and despondent place.
There are a number of parties in the Duma, so many in
fact, and so loosely organised, that majorities are perpetually
wobbling, and there are constant surprises and catch votes.
The Government refuses to legalise the Opposition parties,
so that outside the Duma they have no officially recognised
standing, though the existence of a Cadet or Constitutional
Democratic Party is to a limited extent tolerated. On the
extreme right is the Party of the Right, composed of various
representatives of reactionary organisations. This party
stands theoretically for the repeal of the Constitution and
the complete restoration of the Autocracy, but its members
have sat for five years in one Duma, and seem likely to sit
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 83
for five years in another, so that the pleasant habit of being
members of parliament seems to be gaining ground on their
anti-constitutionalist theories. Their leaders, the Kursk
deputies Purishkevich and Markov, have gained imperial
notoriety for their use of vituperative language, and the name
Purishkevich is used by peasants even in the Northern
Caucasus as an extremely offensive epithet. The Right
maintain a reactionary agitation throughout the country,
are in league with the police, and represent the most obscure
and the most obscurantist side of the bureaucracy. It
would be hard to find among the Duma Right idealists of
reaction, for the most part it is a singularly crude and
materialist type of reactionary that is here represented.
Their strength lies solely in the prevalence of reaction in the
bureaucracy.
Next to the Right come the Nationalists, who represent
Stolypin's attempt to form a Government Party. While
the Right is composed chiefly of peasants, priests and country
gentlemen, the Nationalist Party is composed chiefly of country
gentlemen and Government officials, with a sprinkling of
priests to whom the extreme coarseness of the Right is
distasteful. The party was influential during Stolypin's
lifetime, but is losing its importance and has split into two
groups. What the Nationalists stand for politically it is
difficult to say, except that they vehemently assert the
necessity of maintaining and increasing restrictions on the
non-Russian nationalities. But they are a party of moods,
and in the main they simply constitute one of the parliamentary
outposts of the bureaucracy. One of the Nationalist deputies,
M. Shulgin, from the Kiev government, is the ablest and
most logical speaker on the Right side of the House.
Then come the Octobrists, who constitute the Centre and
held the balance of power in the Third Duma. The party
takes its name from the October Constitutionalist Manifesto,
stands for constitutional government, and has made a long
and painful experiment in establishing the foundations of
84 Russia of the Russians
constitutional government by co-operation with the bureau-
cracy. The party is composed mainly of country gentlemen
of a conservative temperament who are strongly averse from
radical and violent measures, but are desirous of seeing
constitutional principles put into force. Such a party is
clearly unfitted to play a heroic part in a critical epoch ;
but in the Third Duma it had a vigorous leader in the person
of M. Guchkov, who pursued a very intricate and interesting
policy. M. Guchkov comes of a Moscow merchant family
of Old Believers, and is a keen sportsman with a love of
adventure, of fighting for its own sake. He fought with the
Boers in the Transvaal War, and worked with the Red Cross
in the Manchurian War and in the Balkans. He was one
of the founders of the Octobrist Party, and an open supporter
of the Government policy of suppressing the revolutionary
movement by summary and violent measures. He was
among the public men whom Stolypin consulted after the
dissolution of the First Duma with the view to their becoming
members of the Cabinet, and who refused on learning the
conditions. M. Guchkov's political career actually began
when he was elected deputy from Moscow in the Third Duma
and became leader of the Octobrist party. The position
was an exceedingly difficult one, and M. Guchkov thought
that the only hope lay in gradually permeating the govern-
ment with a constitutionalist leaven. Stolypin in those days
was disposed to effect certain obviously necessary reforms,
and he and Guchkov agreed to work together. Guchkov
making heavy concessions on the Duma's part on condition
that Stolypin would protect the Duma against the restora-
tionists and gradually introduce reforms. Theoretically the
bargain was a sound one, and one result of it was that the
Duma did tide over a very difficult and dangerous period,
and evaded premature dissolution. But Stolypin was forced
back by the extreme reactionaries from point to point, and
was unable to carry out the promised reforms. His repressive
measures remained in force, and there was not a glimmer
A. I. GUCHKOV
[Octobrist Leader)
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 85
of constitutional liberty. Guchkov, again, was very indiffer-
ently backed by the bulk of his own party, which understood
the policy of constantly throwing a sop to Cerberus much
better than an active policy of permeation and penetration
of bureaucratic strongholds. Guchkov was forced to make
very heavy concessions, and openly to identify himself with
highly unpopular and unconstitutional measures. Then
Stolypin went to the Right, broke with the Octobrists, and
in the days when his personal energy and political power
were fading formed the party of the Nationalists. For a
time Guchkov was President of the Third Duma, and in the
position tried to pursue his chosen policy more effectively.
He spoke rarely in the Duma, but when he did his speeches
were always impressive and his words carefully chosen.
' We are waiting," was the closing phrase of one of his best-
known speeches, and this phrase was characteristic of his
party's attitude. Guchkov's policy kept the Third Duma
going, or rather kept it from going into the limbo into which
its predecessors had gone. But the injury to the Duma's
dignity and value was grave — history never fails to demand
a heavy price, moral and material, for every achievement in
Russia — and M. Guchkov suffered personally for his close
identification with the policy of the Government and it cost
him his seat in Moscow. He was not elected to the Fourth
Duma, and is at present engaged in municipal politics in St.
Petersburg. M. Guchkov represents an unusual combination
of the business man and the intelligent, and his interest in
affairs is constantly interwoven with his interest in ideas,
and reinforced by an unfailing spirit of enterprise.
Other prominent members of the Octobrist Party are M.
Rodzianko of Ekaterinoslav, a giant of a man with a resonant
bass voice, the owner of immense estates, a Court Chamberlain
and a persistent defender of the ceremonial rights and
privileges of the Duma on public occasions ; M. Rodzianko
was President of the Third Duma during the last year of its
existence, and was elected President of the Fourth Duma ;
86 Russia of the Russians
the former President of the Third Duma, M. Nicholas
Homiakov, the son of a famous Slavophil poet, a shrewd
and witty country gentleman, who might easily occupy a
distinguished position if his energy were proportionate to his
talent ; and M. Shidlovsky, a Conservative Constitutionalist
of a clear-cut and very conscientious type, and a lucid and
able speaker. Baron Meyendorff, of Livland, a scrupulous
and unbending opponent of all forms of illegality, and one
of the ablest and most conspicuous Octobrists in the Third
Duma, has left the party owing to disapproval of its support
of the Government's Finnish policy.
To the Left of the Octobrists is the Opposition, composed
of four parties and the Mohammedan and Polish groups.
The Polish group, composed of conservative deputies from
Poland and Lithuania, drags out a melancholy and undis-
tinguished existence in a Duma in which Russian Nationalism
is militant. It once had an aggressive and conspicuous leader
in the person of M. Roman Dmowski of Warsaw, but since
his retirement the group has rarely attracted attention. A
handful of Mohammedan deputies represent the Tartars
of the Volga, the Urals and the Caucasus, and bear a heavy
burden in defence of their confessional and educational
interests.
Between the Octobrists and the next large party, the Cadets,
sit the Progressists, pacific Constitutionalists who object to
Octobrist tactics on the one hand, and to various points in
the Cadet programme on the other. Its most prominent
members are M. Nicholas Lvov, a Vice-President of the
Fourth Duma, a Zemstvo Constitutionalist, a chivalrous and
passionate speaker, and a Hamlet in his incapacit}^ for action ;
M. Konovalov, a young and active Moscow merchant ; and
the party leader, M. Efremov, an ardent Pacifist.
The Cadets, or Constitutional Democrats, are a fairly large
group, numbering from fifty to sixty deputies, and now
occupy the position of leaders of the Opposition in the Duma
and in the country. This is sorry comfort for the loss of the
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 87
leadership of the first two Dumas, and the conduct of an
Opposition policy under the present conditions is the most
trying and thankless task that could be imagined. The
Cadets represent Constitutionalism in its undiluted and un-
modified form, and maintain a clear and strict line of demarca-
tion between themselves and the bureaucracy. Their speeches
are, as a matter of necessity, mainly devoted to criticisms of
Government methods and exposures of administrative abuses,
and as the party includes the most powerful speakers in
the Duma the attacks and exposures of the Cadets are as
thoroughly effective as speeches can be which year after year
find the same abuses to attack, unmodified and unmitigated.
The Cadet Party has had a strange history. Formed at the
end of 1905, through the fusion of the Zemstvo Constitution-
alists with leaders of the professional classes in the towns,
it drafted a programme of democratic and constitutional
reform which attracted for it wide sympathy. The party
was admirably organised, established branches in all parts
of the Empire, had its programme translated into all the
languages of the Empire, and secured a large majority in the
elections to the First Duma. There was a moment when it
seemed possible that Cadets would be summoned to form
a Cabinet. But a lack of firmness in resisting the pressure
of the more headstrong Labour and Socialist Left in the
First Duma proved fatal. After the dissolution of the
First Duma the Cadets took the leading part in the drafting
of the Viborg Manifesto, which cannot now be justified on
any political grounds. Many of the ablest members of the
Party signed the Manifesto, and in consequence not only
did they suffer three months' imprisonment, but what is
much more serious, were permanently deprived of the franchise.
This was the case with the veteran. Zemstvo Constitutionalist,
M. Ivan Petrunkevich of Tver, one of the most attractive
figures in Russian public life, a man of profound Liberal
principle and ripe experience, and a courageous assertor of
constitutional principles during the long period of reaction
7— (2400)
88 Russia of the Russians
in the eighties and nineties. This was the case, too, with
M. Nabokov, the son of one of Alexander lis ministers, whose
eloquence and business capacity as displayed in the First
Duma, seemed to give promise of an exceptionally distinguished
political career. And this was the case with scores of others
who signed the appeal.
The party became the object of unremitting Government
hostilities. It was refused official authorisation. Its meetings
were declared illegal, its organisation, as far as possible, broken
up. It has not held a congress for years. In the Second
Duma it again secured a majority, including such able men
as MM. Maklakov and Struve, but the change in the Electoral
Law in 1907 robbed it of its preponderance of voting power,
and it came up to the Third Duma a comparatively small
group to face a strong majority which was favourable to the
Government. At present the Cadet deputies are returned
chiefly by the cities and large towns. Both St. Petersburg
and Moscow return Cadets, and there are a few Cadet
representatives from the rural districts.
The leader of the Cadets, M. Paul Miliukov, has set the
stamp of his personality very strongly upon the party. Born
somewhere over fifty years ago, educated in Moscow, he
became a lecturer in history in the Moscow University, and
published a number of valuable works on Russian History.
He was popular as a lecturer, but was frequently harassed by
the police on account of his liberal views, and was compelled
to give up his post at the University. In the nineties the
young Principality of Bulgaria invited him to organise the
State College of Sofia on University lines, and in Sofia M.
Miliukov spent several years making that thorough study
of the Balkans which afterwards made him the most competent
authority on Balkan politics amongst Russian public men.
Returning to St. Petersburg he for some years led the life
of a litterateur, took part in the Liberal movement, was a
prominent member of the Liberation League, the leaders
of which were the Zemstvo Constitutionalists, and on returning
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 89
from Chicago, where in 1905 he gave a series of lectures on
the Russian crisis, he threw himself into the work of politically
organising the professions in the towns and linking up these
new professional unions with the Zemstvo Liberal organisa-
tions. He was one of the chief initiators of the Constitutional
Democratic Party which was founded in Moscow at the
moment of the promulgation of the Constitution. He was
not a member of the First or Second Dumas, though he was
constantly active behind the scenes. In 1907 he was elected
member for St. Petersburg by a heavy vote, and retained his
position at the elections to the Fourth Duma. The general
tactics of the Cadet Party were largely determined by his
influence, and for the last few years he has steadily borne the
brunt of the parliamentary conflict as Opposition leader in
a time of reaction. M. Miliukov has a capacity for work
and a tenacity of purpose exceptional among Russian public
men, and therein lies his strength as a leader. He is an
intelligent with no experience in affairs except what he has
gained in recent years, and this explains to a considerable
extent both his defects and his qualities. He has a wide
knowledge of European politics, and is an able and resourceful
speaker. The mistakes he makes — serious ones, sometimes
at critical moments — are those that academic men do make
when they overreach themselves in trying to be practical.
But M. Miliukov's most characteristic and admirable feature
is a sort of downright doggedness. Guchkov and Miliukov,
the chief rival party leaders of the present period, are much
less unlike than differences in tactics and in views on current
question make them seem. They both have a large share
of that hard bedrock sense which may be distinctly
Muscovite, and has at any rate meant a great deal in the
process of Russian state-building.
Other leading members of the Cadet Party in the Duma
are M. Vasili Maklakov, a Moscow lawyer, brother of the
present Minister of the Interior, the most talented, logical
and forceful speaker in the House, whose speeches are always
90 Russia of the Russians
looked forward to as an event ; M. Rodichev, a Zemstvo
worker from Tver, and a fiery and passionate orator
upon whose talent the years in the heavy atmosphere of the
Third Duma have had a depressing effect ; M. Shingarev, a
Zemstvo doctor from Voronezh, who in the course of a few
years of hard work in the Duma has gained an expert know-
ledge of Imperial finance ; and the Secretary of the Second
Duma, M. Chelnokov of Moscow. The Cadet Party is the
best disciplined in the House.
The Labour Party, which was so strongly represented in
the First and Second Dumas, has constituted in the Third
and Fourth an insignificant group with no leaders to com-
pare with Zhilkin, Aladin and Anikin, who enjoyed such
authority in the First Duma.
The Social Democrats number about twenty, of whom several
are working men. They deny the legislative value of the Duma
as at present constituted, and use its tribune as a medium
for protesting against the present regime, but by the mere
habit of constantly partaking in its sittings they are imper-
ceptibly drawn into legislative work like their enemies the
reactionaries at the opposite end of the Chamber. In spite
of their small numbers and their lack of good speakers — M.
Chheidze, a Georgian from the Caucasus, is the best — they
succeed in maintaining a very consistent protest. In doing
so they are aided by the Social Democratic organisations
outside the Duma, which, in defiance of police restriction?
and repression, carries on a persistent agitation amongst the
working-men, and keeps two little papers going in spite of
daily fines.
Party lines are sharply drawn in the Duma, and members
of different parties rarely associate. The Committees form
more or less neutral ground where deputies frequently sink
their differences, and where they rub shoulders with the
representatives of the bureaucracy who come down to give
explanations on budget questions and on various Government
bills. In the committees, the deputies study the complex
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 91
technique of administration and learn the workings of the
bureaucratic machine. They are frequently enabled in this
way effectively to oppose abuses, but often the bureaucratic
spirit penetrates the committees and gently subdues those
deputies who do not possess great force of character. It is
strange to watch the process of the gradual bureaucratisation
of the Duma through the committees. With the members of
the Right, and even of the Centre, there was no difficulty,
because a great many of them were bureaucrats by training
and had simply retired from the service to become deputies.
And on the left the mere depressing routine of the Duma,
the impossibility of maintaining close contact with the coun-
try, and the necessity of constantly breathing the atmos-
phere of bureaucratic St. Petersburg has a devitalising and
assimilative effect.
And yet the Duma is a pledge of progress. Its sittings
are public, and are reported daily in all the newspapers of
the Empire. The constant discussion of administrative
questions has a broadly educative value. Every year the
budget is discussed in detail, and the public has grown familiar
with its main features and with the chief abuses that need
remedying. The Duma has the right of questioning ministers
on matters that call for protest. All parties frequently avail
themselves of this privilege, and ministers are compelled to
come down to the House to give explanations, the verdict of
the Duma on which has a certain moral effect. An enormous
amount of time is wasted on bills of minor importance, on
such matters, for instance, as the employment of an additional
postal official in Harbin, matters that might be relegated to
the competence of some local body. But the Duma tries to
promote reforms, to amend Government bills, to embody in
law some of the constitutional principles. Only here its
efforts are perpetually thwarted. The Upper House, the
Council of the Empire, is a stronghold of the bureaucracy,
and effectively blocks any measures that are disagreeable to
the Government.
92 Russia of the Russians
The Council of the Empire is an interesting institution,
much more interesting in many ways than the Duma. Be-
fore the Constitution this Council had existed
of^he ^rnTre * or neaI "ly a hundred years as a kind of con-
clave, an advisory assembly of the highest
legal authorities of the bureaucracy established for the pur-
pose of drafting laws which the Monarch might, or might not,
confirm at his pleasure. All the highest dignitaries of the
Empire were there, ministers and ex-ministers, retired am-
bassadors, generals, admirals, and administrators of various
categories. Of the Council of the Empire in its pre-consti-
tutional form the artist Riepin has painted a striking and
characteristic picture, which now hangs in the Alexander III
Museum in St. Petersburg. With the promulgation of the
Constitution and the establishment of the Duma, the Council
was reformed. Half of the members are appointed by the
Emperor as before, and the other half by the clergy and
various public institutions, such as provincial assemblies of
the gentry, Zemstvos, industrialists' associations, and learned
bodies. There are two hundred members in all. The Council
meets in the Marie Palace, near St. Isaac's Cathedral, in a
lofty, well-like hall, of scarlet and gleaming white, lighted
from above. The President is seated high up on a command-
ing dais, and, looking down from the visitors' gallery one
sees, far below, long rows of bald heads reposing in capacious
arm-chairs. The party divisions roughly correspond to those
in the Duma. There is a reactionary Right, a Conservative
Centre, and a numerically inconsiderable Left composed of
Cadet and Progressist professors and Zemstvo men. The
Bureaucracy is safe here, for, not to speak of the appointed
members, the greater proportion of the elected members are
connected with the Bureaucracy by the most intimate ties.
There is nothing here of the restlessness and nervousness of
the Duma. There is an impressive dignity of deportment,
an atmosphere of grave authority, a scrupulousness in the
observance of formalities. Noisy declamation is frowned on.
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 93
All these elderly councillors, with years of experience behind
them in the chancelleries and in the provinces, have a fine
sense of the gradations of rank and authority, and are pre-
pared at any moment, at the bidding of authority, to abandon
their own carefully considered views. There are many able
men in the Council, and their judgment on points of law and
administration is often singularly valuable. Some of the
speeches in the Council attain a high level of oratory. Original
views are presented with exceptional cogency, subtlety of
argument, and wealth of illustration. Only the net result
of these stately debates is that reforms are simply decorously
buried. The Council may waver and, on occasion, indulge
in a mild flutter of opposition to the Government, but in
the end it nearly always does as the Government wishes
it to.
There is no better place than the Council of the Empire
for studying the psychology of the Bureaucracy and the
lingering Byzantine conceptions of authority. Complicated
intrigues are carried on here, intrigues against the Cabinet,
or between rival members of the Cabinet, intrigues that are
played with great resource and a fine calculation of means
and ends, and, above all, of the safety of the players. There
is close contact between the Council and the Court. The
Ministers are members of the Council and vote there. Official
connection with the Duma is maintained by a Commission
of Agreement, the object of which is to reconcile the different
views of the two Houses on bills under debate. A loose,
irregular and unofficial connection with the Lower House is
maintained by the members of various parties, but the
Council's persistent blocking of reform bills has created an
antagonism between the Upper House and the majority of
the Duma. The Council of the Empire carries on its business
so quietly that the general public is almost oblivious of its
existence. Two names in the Council of the Empire are
widely known to the outside world. These are Count Sergius
Witte and the present Premier, M. Kokovstev.
94 Russia of the Russians
Count Witte, on whose urgent advice the Emperor pub-
lished the Constitutional Manifesto, has since the opening of
the First Duma, ceased to take a prominent
Count Witte. part in public life. There was a time when
many were disposed to regard him as a very
big man indeed, or, at any rate, as a man born under the bright
star of power. The son of an official in Tiflis, educated in
Tiflis and Odessa, he grew up on the outskirts of the Empire
in a kind of colonial atmosphere, where Russian life was new,
little hampered by tradition, rough and ready, devoted
frankly to money-making. And if the circumstances of
Witte's upbringing imbued him with strong business leanings
of a very modern type, his years of service in the South
Western Railways added to his taste for figures and the
rapid movement of commercial enterprise, a keen interest
in steel and iron with all their manifold applications, in a
word, in modern industry. When he came in the nineties
to St. Petersburg, his remarkable business ability attracted
attention, and as Minister of Ways and Communications,
and afterwards as Minister of Finance, he very energetically,
and with little regard for tradition, applied modern business
principles to the task of bureaucratic Government. He did
his utmost, in fact, to modernise the bureaucracy, to bring
it up to date, almost to Americanise it. He did succeed in
effecting some very valuable financial reforms. He fixed
the gold standard of the currency, and established a gold
reserve in the Imperial Bank. He built a number of railways,
including the Trans-Siberian, and by forcing on railway con-
struction so that the great metallurgical works should never
lack Government orders for railway material, and by main-
taining in vigour a high protective tariff he tried to promote
the development of industry in Russia. Witte was a man
of big plans, big schemes, but the very bigness of Russia,
the very vastness of the field before him caused him to
forget the distinction between political and industrial enter-
prise. And when the inflated Manchurian schemes led to
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 95
catastrophe abroad and grave internal disturbances, Witte
perceived that the process of modernisation had not gone
far enough, and he came home from America, the country of
big business enterprise, with the conviction that a constitu-
tion was necessary. Then, when all the railways he had
built stopped running, he succeeded in inducing the Emperor
to promulgate a constitutional manifesto. For a time this
big, very Russian-looking man, with the masterful manner,
tried to apply business principles in the administration of
the Constitution — there was a curious scent of business in
the air in those early constitutional days — but he missed his
way and somehow lost his footing. Probably the years
during which, in spite of all his innovations, he had steadily
adapted himself to the bureaucratic system, had made him
too much of a bureaucrat after all. The glow of his sudden
popularity faded during the winter of repression that
followed on the constitutional edict, and the First Duma
forgot all about him. Witte acted thenceforth quietly as a
member of the Council of the Empire, only rarely emerging
into prominence. For several years he felt the effects of the
revulsion of feeling at Court against the Constitution. The
reactionaries for long bitterly attacked him as a traitor to
the Monarchical principle on the ground that he had misled
the Emperor in inducing him to sign the Constitutional
Manifesto. Witte waited, and then, at the first convenient
opportunity, subtly affirmed in the Council of the Empire
his devotion to the Autocracy, cautiously disavowed Con-
stitutionalism, and little by little made good his position
amongst the reactionaries. He was suspected of intriguing
against Stolypin in 1909 and 1911, and there were vague
rumours of a possibility of his being again called to power.
In any case he was restored to favour after his professions
of devotion to the Autocracy, and during the last few years,
he has several times been received at Court. Perhaps as
the wheel of fortune turns around he may again at some
critical moment be made Premier. For the present he
96 Russia of the Russians
remains a problematical figure in the background, an obscure
reminder of great possibilities unfulfilled for lack of sheer
consistency of purpose, of firmness of political principle, and
of the finer forms of perception. His personal ambition
was never absorbed in a glowing ardour of national renewal
which might of itself have shown the right way and led Witte
to real greatness.
The present Premier and Minister of Finances, M. Kokov-
stev, is a man of a very different type. In appearance he
differs strikingly from Witte. Witte's bulky
M. Kokovstev. figure would overshadow M. Kokovstev,
who is of less than middle height, and while
Witte's whole bearing is suggestive of careless enterprise,
M. Kokovstev's trim figure and neatly-clipped beard bespeak
the methodical and circumspect mind. M. Kokovstev was
born in the government of Novgorod, which has lost every
vestige of its ancient democratic tradition, and has practi-
cally become a suburb of St. Petersburg. He has spent his
whole life in the St. Petersburg Chancelleries, has steadily
climbed rung after rung of the bureaucratic ladder, and
acquired a thorough knowledge of the finances of the Empire,
and since 1906 has been a shrewd, economical, and invariabfy
optimistic Minister of Finance. He imperturbably negotiates
loans in Paris, and with equal imperturbability defends
article after article of his Budgets in the Duma. He speaks
quietly, in rounded periods, frames his arguments, as he has
for years been accustomed to frame them, in innumerable
official reports, never hesitates for a word, never displays
excessive emotion, rarely appeals to the emotions of his
hearers. Once in a Duma speech he unexpectedly let fall
a phrase, " Thank God ! we have no Parliament," which
aroused great indignation among the deputies, evoked a
protest from the speaker, M. Homiakov, and for a time
secured for M. Kokovstev the reputation of a reactionary
bureaucrat who desired the abolition of Constitutional Govern-
ment. The phrase was, however, due to a misunderstanding,
M. VLADIMIR KOKOVSTEV
{President of the Council of Ministers)
The Bureaucracy and the Constitution 97
and all that M. Kokovstev intended to say was that the
parliamentary system under which ministers were respon-
sible to the Representative Assembly does not prevail in
Russia. On the whole M. Kokovstev is believed to be cau-
tiously progressive rather than reactionary in his views. But
he is not a strong personality, and secures his ends rather
by discreet self-effacement than by vigorous insistence on
his own point of view. He certainly does not pursue either
the policy of general repression, or the aggressive policy in
regard to the non-Russian nationalities with the same energy
as his predecessor. Even apart from differences of tempera-
ment there is a difference between the position of M. Kokov-
stev and that of M. Stolypin which largely accounts for certain
divergences in their respective policies. While Stolypin
as Premier retained the post of Minister of the Interior, M.
Kokovstev retains as Premier the post of Minister of Finances
and leaves the Ministry of the Interior to others. Under
the pre-constitutional regime the Ministry of the Interior,
which has under its control governors, police and gendarmerie,
that is, the greater part of the machinery of administration,
and practically all the machinery of oppression, was the
most powerful of all. In a conflict between M. Plehve, the
Minister of the Interior, and M. Witte, the Minister of Finances,
Plehve easily defeated his opponent, in spite of the latter's
greater positive services. With the union of all the Ministers
in a Cabinet or Council of Ministers, the chief power was
formally placed in the hands of the President or Premier.
But the old rivalry between the Ministries continued, and
the Ministry of the Interior gradually recovered its influence
and power. M. Durnovo, as Minister of the Interior in M.
Witte's Cabinet, by his repressive policy succeeded in putting
Witte completely in the shade. Stolypin, by retaining in
his hands the Ministry of the Interior after he had become
Premier, united with the formal authority implied in the
Premiership the real power accruing from direct control over
the machinery of the administration and repression. And it
98 Russia of the Russians
was this circumstance that for a time made his position a
peculiarly strong one, though in the end it involved him in
a network of tragic contradictions. M. Kokovstev as a Pre-
mier occupying the post of Minister of Finance is naturally
disposed to regard the whole task of Imperial administration
from the financial and economic rather than the police point
of view, and so to exercise on the whole a moderating and
restraining influence. There has been no actual change of
policy during his premiership, but perhaps there has been a
change of tone.
Outside the Duma and the Council of the Empire there is
little political life in the country except at election times.
The only parties that had strong political organisations were
the Cadets and Social Democrats, but the Social Democratic
organisation has been persecuted out of visible existence,
while that of the Cadets has been rendered largely ineffective
by police repression. Members of the Duma rarely receive
police permission to address their constituents, and members
of the Centre and the Right hardly ever display a desire to
do so. Ministers naturally never dream of stumping the
country. It is only through the Press reports of the Duma
debates that the country is kept in touch with the political
life of the capital.
The political situation created by the curious combination
of a bureaucracy with a representative assembly is full of
difficulties, but also full of very interesting possibilities. The
country is awake, is growing rapidly, has suddenly deter-
mined to be modern. The mental awakening and the
economic boom have set the Empire definitely in the path
of progress. One may hope that the pursuit of this path
may be as painless as possible. But the Russian people has
learned, during its historical development, deep lessons of
patience and suffering. It was not born for facile victories.
CHAPTER III
THE PRESS
The condition of the Russian Press is conspicuously illustra-
tive of the transition period through which the Empire is
now passing. The Press is not free. It is
The Press. still subjected to a variety of harassing re-
strictions. But it is freer than it was eight
or nine years ago. Words that in 1904 were rigorously banned
by the censor are now in daily use in newspapers of all shades.
Opinions that until recently were regarded as seditious have
now become mere unexciting commonplaces in the articles of
hack journalists. Public criticism of the Administration is
now permitted within certain limits. The discussion of home
and foreign politics is conducted in the capitals with a lati-
tude that renders possible a tolerably adequate statement of
the pros and cons. Public opinion does now find expression
to a considerable degree in the Press. There are risks, it is
true. A responsible journalist must have a very keen per-
ception of what is and what is not likely to bring down on
his paper severe penalties from the authorities. But it is no
longer necessary — in the capitals at least — to resort, as in
old days, to innuendo or to quaint paraphrase in order to
describe events that are of everyday occurrence in Western
Europe. In 1904, for instance, it was considered a very
daring feat when a Liberal paper in humorous verse des-
cribed the approach of a railway train bringing a lady named
" Ko," which, as the readers were supposed to understand,
meant " Constitution." The word constitution is now re-
iterated a hundred times daily in various Russian organs
and arouses no emotion whatever, except one of vague
disappointment.
The position of the Russian Press has undergone many
changes during the turmoil of the last few years. Until
October, 1905, the preventive censorship was in force.
99
100 Russia of the Russians
Every number of a newspaper had to be submitted to a
censor before publication, and the number could only be
issued after the censor had erased whatever seemed to him
objectionable. The opinion of the authorities constantly
varies as to the limits of the permissible. A wide range of
questions of burning interest might at any moment be declared
unsuitable for treatment in the Press. Editors spent the
midnight hours in tedious bargaining with censors over words
and phrases. Sometimes the dispute would extend to more
general topics, and the censors themselves would often un-
expectedly express radical views. One night, in 1905, a tired
and yawning editor was astonished to hear his censor — who
happened to be particularly meticulous in his criticism —
declare himself a Tolstoyan.
To evade the censor's red pencil skilful circumlocution was
necessary. The phrase " legal order " did duty for " con-
stitutional government." The words " socialism " and
" socialist " were banned, but " Marxism " and " Marxist "
were often allowed to pass. Opinions that could be freely
expressed in a book of over 300 pages were sternly prohibited
in newspapers. It was difficult for a press opposed to the
bureaucracy to exist at all. That certain Liberal organs
were allowed to exist was a concession to that modern spirit
which the bureaucracy could not wholly ignore. And the
appearance of several new Liberal organs in 1904 and 1905
was in itself an indication that the war and the internal
unrest of those years had opened the eyes of the Govern-
ment to the necessity of making concessions to public opinion.
The growth of the Liberal Press, in fact, ran parallel with the
steady multiplication of Government promises of reforms.
The Constitutional Manifesto of October 30, 1905, pro-
claimed the principle of liberty of the Press. For forty days
— from November 4 till December 15 — the Press did actually
enjoy complete liberty. Editors simply ignored the censors,
and no one interfered with them. Opinions of every kind
were expressed with absolute freedom, and in the strongest
The Press 101
language. A large number of new organs — mostly of a
socialistic character— appeared, and views that it had been
until then possible to express only in revolutionary organs
published abroad and smuggled across the frontier were
enunciated with great force and emphasis in organs like the
Social Democratic Novaia Zhizn that were sold daily in
hundreds by elated newsboys on the Nevsky Prospect. Re-
strictive regulations were published on December 7, and
again in March, and from the beginning of December on-
wards papers were constantly confiscated or suspended.
But in spite of this renewal of administrative rigour, the
Press continued to display great boldness. Newspapers
were widely and eagerly read. New organs sprang up like
mushrooms. Hundreds of educated and half-educated men
and women flocked into journalism. The period from Octo-
ber, 1905, until the dissolution of the first Duma in June,
1906, was the hey-day of the Russian Press. In comparison
with the liberty enjoyed then, the present state of the Press
seems like a return to bondage. It is liberty only if compared
with the pre-constitutional period.
If the position of the Press were determined only by the
Provisional Regulations published in December, 1905, and
March, 1906, Russian journalists would have comparatively
little to complain of. The preventive censorship is abolished,
Censors still exist, however, under another name. They are
now called Press Inspectors, and Censorship Committees are
known as Committees for the Affairs of the Press. The
Censorship on foreign books and papers is maintained, and
English, French, and German papers are still delivered with
whole articles or illustrations blacked out, though this occurs
less frequently than formerly, and the measure is now, as a
rule, applied only to articles referring to the Imperial Family.
But the permission of the authorities is not necessary, as it
once was, in order to begin publishing a newspaper. All
that is requisite is to make a formal notification. Separate
numbers of newspapers may be confiscated on the order of
102 Russia of the Russians
the Press department, but the grounds of confiscation must
be investigated by a court of law, which must either confirm
the confiscation and impose a penalty on the editor for the
offending article, or must acquit the editor and rescind the con-
fiscation. That is to say, Press offences are placed in a line with
other offences, and the final decision in regard to them rests,
theoretically, not with the censor but with the Law Courts.
Under such conditions the lot of the Russian journalist
might be almost a happy one but for two facts. The first
is that the Courts have, during the last few
Restrictions on years, been extremely severe in their treat-
Liberty Of the r -n re t> i- i j
Press ment of Press offences, ror articles, words,
or phrases that displease the Administration,
editors are prosecuted under certain very rigorous para-
graphs of the Criminal Code, conviction under which in-
volves long terms of imprisonment or exile. Hundreds of
Russian journalists have served, or are serving, terms of
imprisonment in a fortress for articles that could only by a
stretch of the imagination be described as seditious. The
term " sedition " has been expanded in judicial practice so
as to cover any expression of opinion or emotion that is dis-
tasteful to the Government or to individual representatives
of the Administration. The Courts are constantly occupied
with so-called " literary cases." When the more urgent
cases had been disposed of, the Press Department went back
to 1906 and 1905 and prosecuted unfortunate journalists for
articles that had long since been forgotten by everyone includ-
ing the authors themselves. This class of cases was, fortunately,
expunged from the Court lists by the Amnesty, promulgated on
the occasion of the Romanov tercentenary in February, 1913.
The second fact, which imposes a most appreciable re-
striction on the liberty of the Press, is the existence of the
exceptional laws. That is to say, since the dissolution of
the second Duma a very large portion of the Empire has
been either under martial law, or one of the milder forms of
the state of siege 1 — of later years most frequently under the
The Press 103
form known as the state of enforced protection. Under
these conditions the discretionary power of administrative
officials, of governors-general, governors, and chiefs of police
is very greatly increased. They may issue what are known
as " Obligatory Regulations," and severely punish by fine,
exile, or imprisonment all whom they regard as offenders
against these regulations without recourse to a Court of Law.
In many places the state of enforced protection is still main-
tained, long after every semblance of revolutionary danger
is past, with the sole object of retaining rigorous administra-
tive control over the Press. At the pleasure of prefects,
governors, and chiefs of police, editors may be subjected to
severe penalties, and the very publication of a newspaper
rendered impossible. The practice of closing or suspending
newspapers has been to a great extent abandoned, because
it was discovered that such measures were made ineffective
by the simple expedient of continuing to publish the same
paper under another name. In consequence of repeated
suspensions during 1906 and 1907, the number of possible
titles of Russian newspapers was almost exhausted, so that
to discover a title for a new paper now involves a heavy tax
on originality. The Administration has found a much more
effective method of control. It imposes fines which gradu-
ally wear down the capital of a newspaper and tend to make
journalism an unprofitable enterprise. The imprisonment
of the editor is offered as an alternative to a fine, and the
poorer provincial papers frequently prefer this form of penalty
to direct financial loss. But the practice of imprisoning
editors has again led to a curious method of defence. The
person who is liable to imprisonment is the so-called
" responsible editor," whose name appears at the end of the
paper. For this reason, as a rule, the actual working editor
remains in the background, and the paper is signed by a
person specially employed for the purpose, and known as the
" sitting editor." A Liberal paper that commenced publi-
cation in St. Petersburg in 1912 broke with the custom, the
8— (*40o)
104 Russia of the Russians
actual editor came into the open and signed as responsible
editor. One night, in revising the proofs of an article attack-
ing a certain police official named Colonel Halle, he struck
out the name Halle as a precaution against possible penal-
ties. When the article appeared, the Press Department took
the word " colonel " as referring to a more exalted personage,
and by administrative order the editor was sentenced to
three months' imprisonment without the option of a fine.
The proprietors took the lesson to heart, and engaged as
responsible editor a long-bearded, impecunious peasant
at a salary of five pounds a month while at liberty, and half
as much again while in gaol.
The newspapers in the capitals maintain a fairly tolerable
existence in spite of occasional fines and the constant prose-
cution of responsible editors. There is a very wide range of
subjects now in regard to which free discussion is entirely
permissible, and the fact that the whole extent of Imperial
Policy is publicly discussed in the Duma makes it impossible
to carry restrictions on the metropolitan Press to an extreme.
The case of the provincial Press is infinitely worse. In the
small provincial towns where the officials have little to do,
everybody knows everybody, and there are all kinds of petty
intrigues and personal accounts to settle, journalists are wholly
at the mercy of governors and other officials armed with dis-
cretionary powers. The treatment of the provincial Press
supplies an inexhaustible fund of curious anecdotes. One
day, in 1906, the Viatsky Krai, in Viatka, failed to appear,
because the governor had expelled from the town every
member of the staff. A newspaper in Kherson was fined
for publishing a telegram of the official Telegraph Agency
reporting a speech of Sir Francis Younghusband's on Tibetan
affairs. A governor of Tambov, M. Muratov, drew up a list
of newspapers under three heads, " desirable," " undesirable,"
and " absolutely intolerable," and closed public libraries and
dismissed elementary school teachers who subscribed to organs
of the latter two categories. Printing works are frequently
The Press 105
closed so as to prevent the publication of a newspaper. The
only printing works in the town of Kozlov, for instance,
were closed three times so as to make it impossible to publish
a little paper called the Kozlovskaia Gazeta. To evade such
measures several papers intended for the town of Kaluga
were printed in Moscow, which is only a few hours distant.
The Administration constantly prohibits reference to certain
facts in the Press. It has been forbidden, for instance, at
various times and in various places, to refer to the dissolution
of the Duma, to the funeral of the Speaker of the First Duma,
Muromtsev, and the funeral of Tolstoy, to the fanatical monk,
Iliodor, or to the notorious agent provocateur, Azev. All
these subjects might be regarded as political, but reference
has also been frequently prohibited to events of an entirely
non-political character. The papers of one town were for-
bidden to refer to a woman who had thrown sulphuric acid
in the face of a priest, other papers were forbidden to touch
on the behaviour of the teachers in the local high school,
while the papers of a town in the Northern Caucasus were
not permitted to mention the bad acting of an artiste with
whom the local chief of police was on friendly terms. Papers
are occasionally fined for printing reports of Panslavist meet-
ings, for misprints, and even for publishing shorthand reports
of debates in the Duma. The total of fines imposed on the
Press in 1912 was 100,000 roubles (£10,000). The editor of
a paper named Yug declared he was ill, whereupon the local
governor suspended his paper on the ground that a sick man
could not edit a newspaper. Many provincial editors have
been so harassed by the authorities that they have in despair
offered to submit their papers to a preventive censorship.
A paper called the Yuzhnia Viedomosti, published in the
Crimea, was confiscated seventy times, but the editor was
only prosecuted three times. And similar instances of the
arbitrary attitude of the Administration to journalists might
be multiplied endlessly.
The remarkable thing is, that in spite of the abuses that
106 Russia of the Russians
are inseparable from the present system, the Russian Press,
especially in the provinces, is steadily developing ; ■ the
number of organs is increasing, and on the whole their quality
is improving. People live and grow in spite of politics.
There is a fairly wide neutral sphere which lies outside the
range of the most acrimonious political dispute. Russia is
an immense Empire. There are governors and governors,
and, if in one town, the chief of police persecutes the editor
of the Opposition journal, in another town he plays cards
with him. And many editors have grown wise in this their
troubled generation, and have learned to avoid possible pit-
falls. Journalists suffer far more from administrative penal-
ties than they did in the days of preventive censorship. But
over against this must be set the fact that there are far more
newspapers than there were, and that the number of journal-
ists has greatly increased. And in spite of all restrictions
the Press is now actually in a position to express, however
imperfectly, to guide, and to educate public opinion.
The Russian Press falls into two very distinct categories,
the Press of the capitals, and the provincial journals. In a
highly centralised country like Russia the
The Press in metropolitan press naturally occupies, as
the Province" com P are d with that of the provinces, a posi-
tion of commanding importance. It has
more direct access to the sources of political information, and
is, moreover, less subject than the provincial press to
harassing restrictions. The big St. Petersburg and Moscow
papers circulate widely in the provinces, and frequently the
local organs serve merely as a stop-gap to curiosity until the
mail brings the big papers with all the news of the political
centres. But of late years the provincial press has grown in
importance, and there are some papers, like the Kievskaia
Mysl (Kiev Thought), which are so well supplied by
telegraph and telephone with the latest political news, and
have such a wide circulation that they need fear no longer the
competition of St. Petersburg and Moscow organs. In
The Press 107
remote towns, too, like Baku, Tomsk, or Vladivostok, which
receive the papers from the capitals many days after publi-
cation, the local press naturally plays a much more impor-
tant part than, for instance, in towns like Yaroslavl or Riazan,
which get the Moscow papers on the afternoon of the day of
issue. In respect of provincial circulation there is a certain
rivalry between St. Petersburg and Moscow. The St. Peters-
burg papers have the advantage of proximity to the Ministries
and to the Duma, and for that reason their political news
is a little more authoritative than that of the Moscow Press.
But the Moscow papers get nearly all the important news by
telephone in time for publication simultaneously with the
St. Petersburg papers. The reports of Duma sittings and
lobby gossip are regularly telephoned, so that the advan-
tages of the St. Petersburg papers in this respect are almost
imponderable, and are a matter rather of atmosphere and
direct personal contact between journalists, deputies, and
officials. And what St. Petersburg, as a journalistic centre,
gains politically she loses geographically. Moscow, in virtue
of her more central position, commands the communications
with Eastern and Southern Russia, which the St. Petersburg
papers reach a day later than those of the ancient capital.
The St. Petersburg Press has direct access only to the more
thinly populated Western and Northern region. Thus, the
most widely-circulated paper in Russia is the Russkoe Slovo,
a Moscow organ of the Daily Telegraph type, which is well
supplied with the latest news by telegraph and telephone,
but politically enjoys less authority than many other papers
with a much more limited circulation.
The best known of the St. Petersburg papers is the Nuvoe
Vremia (New Time), founded in 1877 by Alexis Suvorin.
The distinguishing feature of the Novoe
Vremia V '° ,e Uremia is its opportunism. It attacks indi-
vidual ministers and even certain cliques or
groups within the Government. But its criticism is not that
of an outsider, but of a representative of the governing party.
108 Russia of the Russians
The Novoe Vremia is not an official paper, the views it ex-
presses do not by any means always represent the views
held by the Government at a given moment. They rather
represent a shrewd compromise between official views and
public opinion. There are certain organs that are confessedly
reactionary, that demand a complete return to the autocracy.
The Novoe Vremia is not one of these. It stands for repre-
sentative institutions, it stands for the existing system. If
a Liberal government were to come into power to-morrow,
the Novoe Vremia would probably be a Liberal organ. It
owes its material success to the extraordinary skill with
which its late proprietor — M. Suvorin died in 1912 — com-
bined a good news service with a system of playing off one
bureaucratic tendency against another, so as to give the im-
pression of a movement of public opinion. Every influential
chinovnik, or government official, is, in his heart of hearts,
a critic, and very frequently a cynic. He criticises the way
things are done, criticises his superiors, criticises the whole
administrative system, is constantly murmuring or com-
plaining. He murmurs but he conforms, he does not
revolt against the system. When the Novoe Vremia criti-
cises, it as often as not expresses the views of influential
chinovniks. And from time to time it clears itself of all
suspicion of heretical Opposition views by vehement attacks
on Opposition parties and an ardent defence of Government
policy.
But at the same time the Novoe Vremia carefully takes
into account the prevailing tendency of public opinion. It
was during the Russo-Turkish war when a strong body of
Russian public opinion enthusiastically supported the Govern-
ment's Balkan policy that M. Suvorin founded his organ,
and it was on the summit of this wave of national enthusiasm
that the journal first came into prominence. Since that time
the Novoe Vremia has pursued a Nationalist and Pan-Slavist
policy, carefully adapting its expression to the shade assumed
by official Nationalism at every given moment. After the
The Press 109
Russo-Turkish war official Nationalism sharply separated
itself from that generous enthusiasm for the liberation of
kindred peoples which was the mainspring of public interest
in the war, and became almost exclusively synonymous with
the oppression of subject peoples within the Russian Empire.
The Novoe Vremia identified itself with the official policy,
and during the reaction of the eighties and nineties, when
public opinion was almost suppressed out of existence,"
Suvorin remained within the safe shelter of conformity, and
devoted his attention to the development of a good news
service. During the period of unrest which followed on the
outbreak of the war with Japan, the Novoe Vremia closely
followed the movement of public opinion, was liberal at a
moment when Liberalism seemed to have invaded the higher
ranks of the bureaucracy, and in the early days of the First
Duma even ventured to publish a few articles in praise of the
Constitutional Democrats, only to attack them the more
violently when it became clear that they had failed.
The late M. Suvorin, the founder of the Novoe Vremia, and
until a few years ago its sole proprietor, was of peasant origin,
and had a peasant's shrewdness, a peasant's freedom from
doctrinaire prepossessions. He was a cool observer, a sceptic,
a talented and witty writer with an eye for talent in others,
and a man of strong temperament, with a vigorous, instinc-
tive attachment to Russia and things Russian, so that he
was frequently able to impart to his Nationalist policy a tone
of personal conviction. He gathered round him a group of
clever writers, paid them well, and constantly gave the
closest attention to details of organisation, making the Novoe
Vremia unrivalled in Russia from the point of view of news-
paper technique. He was a connoisseur of the theatre, and
founded a theatre of his own in St. Petersburg. Suvorin's
character was made up of curiously contradictory elements ;
he was a hard man of business and very generous in private
life ; loyal in his friendships and shrewdly unscrupulous in his
politics ; a genuine admirer of the arts and letters, but
1 10 Russia of the Russians
capable from commercial, personal, or political motives, of
substituting false values for true in art.
The most widely-known of the contributors to the Novoe
Vremia is M. Menshikov, a journalist of amazing produc-
tivity. Fifteen years ago he published a weekly in which he
advocated an almost undiluted Tolstoyism. M. Menshikov
parades his inconsistency, and his articles are the most per-
' feet expression of the opportunist policy of the Novoe Vremia.
The very length of the articles seems to increase their author-
ity amongst officials, and their contemptuous fluency, their
nonchalant word-play, the ceaseless shimmering of their facile
generalisations, their insinuations and their flattery, are all
factors in M. Menshikov's reputation as a publicist.
A journalist of a very different type is M. Vasili Rozanov,
also a contributor to the Novoe Vremia. M. Rozanov is a
man of very great and original talent with a curious, almost
pagan, capacity for observing the movement of elemental
processes, for noting the workings of nature in things human.
There is a great deal in his writing that is suggestive of Tol-
stoy, and much more that is suggestive of Dostoievsky, and
the originality, the unexpectedness of his point of view startles
and charms, but now more and more frequently repels.
M. Rozanov has a quaint, sly humour, and is the enemy of the
doctrinaire habit of mind. His favourite themes are marriage,
the family, and the Church. Consistency he does not even
pretend to observe. He is a Russian to the core, and his
talent largely consists in the boldness with which he expresses
a peculiarly Russian, realistic outlook.
The oldest and most authoritative of the Liberal organs
is the Moscow Russkia Viedomosti (Russian News), which
was founded fifty years ago, that is to say,
„?. ss !?» at the time when Alexander II was emanci-
Viedomosti. . .
pating the serfs and carrying into execution
his other great reforms. The Russkia Viedomosti has through-
out these fifty years maintained the Liberal traditions of that
epoch with a remarkable consistency that never faltered even
The Press 111
in the darkest moments of reaction. There is a type of mind
known as that of " a Liberal of tl\e sixties," broadly humani-
tarian, rather cosmopolitan than assertively Russian ; just,
moderate, dignified, and full of a deep compassion with a
fine loyalty to abstract principle, and an unflinching devotion
to a clear, unclouded ideal of liberty. Of this type of mind
the Russkia Viedomosti is the best representative in the world
of journalism. Its reputation is unsullied. It stands guard
over the public conscience. It is sometimes dry, but it is never
vulgar. By its moderation and fairness it frequently incurs
the contempt of violent partisans, but it has never pandered
to any of the powers that be. In 1898 it was suspended for
two months, and afterwards subjected to a special form of
preventive censorship.
The Russkia Viedomosti has always been in close touch
with Moscow University. Its former editors, MM. Sobolievski,
Chuprov, Posnikov, and Anuchin were professors, and other
professors frequently wrote leading articles or contributed
special articles of various kinds. At present the principal
members of the editorial staff are Professors Kiesewetter and
Kokoshkin. The Russkia Viedomosti is famed for the accuracy
of its news. In the pre-constitutional period its foreign cor-
respondents, more especially Iollos in Berlin, and Dioneo in
London, imparted constitutional lessons in a veiled form by
emphasising those features of European life that most vividly
illustrated the benefits of civil liberty. In 1905 the Russkia
Viedomosti played an important part in connection with the
Constitutional movement that found expression in the
Zemstvo Congress, and it was the first Russian organ to
publish a project for a Constitution. For the last few years
the journal has supported the Constitutional Democratic
Party in the main, but it retains an independent position,
and cannot in any sense be regarded as the official organ of
the party.
The official organ of the Constitutional Democratic Party,
or rather the organ of its leader, M. Miliukov, is the Riech,
112 Russia of the Russians
published in St. Petersburg. The Riech was founded in 1906,
shortly before the opening. of the First Duma, and has gained
a position of authority by virtue of its connec-
The " Riech ' tion with the strongest and most influential
Journals °^ * ne Opposition parties. It is published by
two prominent members of the First Duma,
the Zemstvo leader, M. Petrunkevich, and M. Nabokov.
The working editor is M. Joseph Hessen, while the policy
of the paper is determined almost exclusively by M. Miliukov,
who writes the majority of the leading articles on political
questions. M. Miliukov is one of the few publicists in Russia
who have a considerable knowledge of international politics,
and his articles on the Near East, of which he has a first-hand
knowledge, are of special interest.
The Moscow Russkoe Slove, the most widely-circulated paper
in Russia, has already been mentioned. It was founded in
1930 by a printer and publisher named Sytin, and gained
popularity during the Russo-Japanese war mainly on account
of the telegrams of M. Nemirovich-Danchenko, a veteran
war-correspondent and novelist, who made his name during
the Russo-Turkish war, and again acted as special corre-
spondent of the Russkoe Slove during the war of the Balkan
Allies with Turkey. Another contributor who has largely
helped to increase the circulation of the Russkoe Slovo is M.
Vlas Doroshevich, the author of witty feuilletons written in
the form of short sentences, each of which is a paragraph in
itself, the effect being that of a series of pistol shots. The
Russkoe Slovo makes a speciality of feuilletons, articles of a
light, descriptive, or pictorial character, and many prominent
Russian writers contribute from time to time articles of this
kind. The journal spends large sums on telegrams from the
provinces and abroad. The Russkoe Slovo is a non-party
paper, but its general policy is one of Opposition to the
Government in conformity with the prevailing tendency of
public opinion.
The Birzhevia Viedomosti (Bourse Gazette) is a St.
The Press 113
Petersburg newspaper that resembles the Russkoe Slovo in
many respects. It is non-party, opposed to the Govern-
ment, sensational and gossipy. Its provincial edition is
widely read by country priests and village school
teachers.
During the last two years two tiny Social Democratic
papers, the Pravda and the Luch have been permitted to
appear in St. Petersburg, though they have been confiscated
almost daily, and their editors fined and imprisoned with
monotonous reiteration.
The Golos Moskvy (Voice of Moscow), founded by M.
Guchkov, was for some years the organ of the Octobrist
Party. In so far as the party has an organ now, the Novoc
Vremia must be regarded as such.
Since 1906 the Government has published an official daily
under the name of the Rossia. The organ of the Ministry of
Finance, The Commercial and Industrial Gazette, is valued by
business men for its wealth of news.
A peculiar position is occupied in Russia by the so-called
Right, or Reactionary Press. In the pre-constitutional
period there were practically three organs of the type, which
on principle upheld the autocracy. One was the Moskovskia
Viedomosti, an old-established organ which subsists on
Treasury advertisements, and acquired importance in the
sixties under the editorship of Katkov, who was the leading
spokesman of the policy of oppressing the subject nationali-
ties, and the chief interpreter of that later school of Slavophil
thought which identified support of the Autocracy, the Ortho-
dox faith and the Russian Nationality with the harshest
manifestations of the bureaucratic system. Katkov was a
talented writer, and, for all his reactionary tendencies, he
frequently revealed glimpses of certain broader aspects of
Imperial policy which even a reactionary bureaucracy was
compelled to take into account. His successor, Gringmuth,
a Lutheran who went over to the Orthodox Church, was a
typical " carrieriste," and pursued Katkov's policy without
114 Russia of the Russians
his talent. Under the editorship of M. Lev Tikhomirov,
a one-time revolutionary and terrorist, who assumed con-
trol of the paper after Gringmuth's death a few years
ago, the Moskovskia Viedomosti has sunk into complete
obscurity.
The second old-established organ of the Right is the Grazh-
danin (The Citizen), a weekly published in St. Petersburg
by Prince Meshchersky. The Grazhdanin was founded in
1872, and among its editors during the early years of its
existence was the novelist Dostoievsky, who published in it
week by week " A Writer's Diary." At first the general tone
of the journal was that of a moderate Conservatism, but
towards the end of the century it became markedly and
aggressively reactionary. Since the promulgation of the
Constitution, Prince Meshchersky has maintained in principle
his reactionary standpoint, but under the cover of his defence
of the autocracy he has permitted himself an undisturbed
liberty of criticism of the Government's policy which is denied
to more progressive journalists. The Liberal journals, in
fact, frequently quote from Prince Meshchersky's organ strong
remarks about the Government, which would involve fines
or imprisonment if their author were a declared Constitu-
tionalist. Prince Meshchersky is an able and witty writer,
and a keen observer, and retains in old age a remarkable
freshness.
The third of the Right organs dating from the pre-consti-
tutional period is the little St. Petersburg daily Sviet, founded
by a retired officer, Komarov, and circulating chiefly among
petty tradesmen. The Sviet subsists on a few simple re-
actionary ideas which it expresses in plain, and at times,
boisterous language. Its style is more moderate, however,
than that of the Right organs of the post-constitutional
period.
Of these organs, the most striking characteristic of which
is a remarkable virulence of language, the most prominent
is the Russkoe Znamia (Russian Banner). There is no paper
The Press 115
quite like the Russkoe Znamia anywhere. Its subject-matter
consists of unbridled abuse of Jews, revolutionaries, Liberals,
constitutionalists of all shades including Octobrists, of Poles
and other non-Russian nationalities in the Empire, of Young
Turks and Englishmen, varied with hysterical cheers for
Throne and Altar, violent attacks on individual Ministers,
or at times on the whole Cabinet, threats of physical violence
against certain individuals or groups. The Russkoe Znamia
is, in fact, the organ of that " Union of the Russian people "
which played such a prominent part in the pogroms or anti-
Semitic riots and massacres of a few years ago. It is char-
acteristic of the spirit of the times that a journal of this kind
enjoys complete liberty of abuse, and is only very rarely
fined, while the Progressive Press is subjected to the severest
restraint. The odd thing is, that enjoying practical immunity
in virtue of their clamorous defence of the autocracy, organs
of the Russkoe Znamia type frequently adopt an almost
revolutionary tone, vehemently attack the bureaucracy and
proclaim a revolt against the Holy Synod. During the last
two years the protection accorded to the Reactionary Unions
and their organs has been to some extent withdrawn, and
they have been compelled to moderate their tone. All three,
the Russkoe Znamia, the Kolokol (The Bell), a clerical organ,
and the Zemshchina (The Voice of the Nation), the organ
of the deputy Purishkevich, are valueless as purveyors of
news, are devoid of talent, and owe whatever influence they
possess to the support of certain powerful circles.
Newspapers are published in the Russian Empire in a great
variety of languages besides Russian, in German, for instance,
French, Finnish, Swedish, Polish, Lettish, Lithuanian,
Esthonian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Little Russian, White Russian,
Tartar, Kirghiz, Armenian, Georgian, Persian, and Yakut
(in Eastern Siberia). This non-Russian Press presents many
interesting features, but a detailed description of it would
be more in place in an account of the various nationalities
it represents than in a work like the present.
116 Russia of the Russians
Apart from administrative restrictions the Russian jour-
nalist works very much under the same conditions as his
confrere in Western Europe. There are certain peculiarities
in the arrangements of Russian papers which strike the
English eye. Articles are more frequently signed than not.
The names of the most prominent journalists are conse-
quently familiar to the public, and the personal element plays
a great part in journalism. Nearly all newspapers publish
from time to time — especially towards the end of the year,
when subscriptions for the coming year are looked for —
lists of their contributors, or lists of " collaborators," as the
members of the editorial staff and contributors are usually
called. Many of the so-called ' collaborators " are well-
known professors or literary or public men who rarely write
in the journal in question, but are content to let their names
add lustre to the list. When a collaborator is offended or
dissatisfied with an article that has appeared in the paper
or with some development in the paper's policy, he as often
as not retires, and does so by publicly withdrawing his name
from the list of collaborators. Sometimes a whole group
of collaborators retires at once, and then they publish a letter
in the journal from which they have retired, or in a rival
journal, explaining the grounds for their resignation.
Another feature that is strange to English newspaper readers
is the " Review of the Press," which most journals publish
daily, and which consists of short extracts from articles in
other papers, accompanied with comments, more often caustic
than laudatory. This constant bandying of compliments is
in striking contrast with that English habit of resolutely
ignoring the existence of every other paper but your
own, which was so rigidly maintained until within recent
years.
The regular staff of a Russian paper usually consists of an
editor, an assistant-editor, a " responsible " or sitting editor,
engaged specially in view of possible exigencies of prison
service, a foreign editor with one or. more assistants, an editor
The Press 117
of the provincial department also with one or more assistants,
a " manager of the chronicle," or news editor with an army of
reporters, a dramatic critic with assistants, an art critic, a
music critic, and an editor of the literary department, all with
more or fewer assistants, as the case may be. In addition, the
big papers have foreign correspondents, and also correspond-
ents in most of the provincial towns. Few Russian papers pay
such attention to their foreign department as do the big
English papers. The place of city editor is filled by the
" editor of the economic department." There are " night
editors," too, or " issuers," who read proofs, and, together
with the printer, make up the paper. And then there are
the regular contributors, of whom some have functions
hardly distinguishable from those of English leader-writers,
that is, they must be prepared to write at any moment on
subjects of which they are supposed to have expert know-
ledge — while others are feuilletonists, whose duty it is to
write witty or amusing articles on literary subjects or on
occurrences in real life, on anything in fact, or nothing at all,
so long as the result is interesting or amusing. Journalists
are of all ranks and classes, peasants, Cossacks, country
gentlemen, retired officers, officials, professors, students,
artists, and novelists.
There is a considerable number of women journalists,
some of whom are feuilletonists, others are reporters, while
occasionally women occupy the editor's chair. During the
short period when the Press enjoyed comparative liberty
and newspapers sprang up in abundance, there was a stam-
pede into the ranks of journalism, and one humorist re-
marked at the time that the bulk of the so-called journalists
were dentists, chemists' assistants, and retired tailors. The
reaction dealt hardly with this army of writers, and most of
the journalists who are now active are, or have become,
professionals. Jews play a conspicuous part in journalism
in Russia, as in other continental countries. The bulk
of the reporting is in their hands, and many
118 Russia of the Russians
editors, leader-writers, and feuilletonists are of Jewish
extraction.
In the capitals journalists are, on the whole, well paid.
The average price for an article is ten kopeks (2|d.) a line,
and sometimes fifteen or twenty kopeks are paid, in excep-
tional cases twenty-five, while well-known and productive
feuilletonists may receive even fifty kopeks (over a shilling)
per line in addition to a large salary. A popular feuilletonist
earns from a thousand to four thousand a year. Energetic
reporters earn large sums, especially if, as they often do,
they sell their news to several papers at the same time, and
know how to take advantage of the reporters' syndicates,
which serve for the interchange of news among their
members.
The number of illustrated weeklies in Russia is small in
comparison with those of England, France, and Germany.
Such papers as the Novoe Vremia, and the Russkoe Slovo,
publish weekly illustrated supplements, and their example
has been followed by some of the provincial organs. Most
of the newspapers in the capitals from time to time print
photographs illustrating the events of the day, and there
seems to be a growing demand for caricatures. An illus-
trated weekly of long standing called the Niva has a wide
circulation. Its illustrations are old-fashioned, but it fre-
quently publishes fiction by the best Russian authors. Tol-
stoy's Resurrection, for instance, was first published in this
journal. And the Niva has done great service in issuing
gratis to its subscribers complete editions of the Russian
classics, and of the works of modern authors whose copyright
has not yet expired.
Comic papers had a vogue in Russia during the months
immediately following on the proclamation of the Constitu-
tion. These papers were devoted almost exclusively to
political satire, and contained bitter, grotesque, violent, and
extraordinarily witty attacks on representatives of the x old
regime. The Russian has a strong sense of humour, and the
The Press 119
conversation of merchants, workmen, and peasants is full
of witty sayings. Comic papers ought to flourish. But the
political reaction seems to have made such papers not only
physically but psychologically impossible. The organs of
political satire were suppressed, and most of their editors
imprisoned or banished in the course of 1906 and 1907. And
since then comic papers have almost ceased to exist. The
only journals of the type that are published rarely dare
venture into the field of politics, and are, as a rule, simply
dull, when they are not vulgar.
Monthly magazines are plentiful, and occupy a very im-
portant position in Russian public life. In the pre-consti-
tutional period they exerted a very appreci-
The Monthlies, able educative influence. The censorship
was far more lenient with the monthlies
than with the dailies, just as it dealt more gently with big and
dear books than with little books that everyone might buy.
And in the monthlies it was possible by a judicious choice of
phrase to discuss political and economic questions with con-
siderable freedom. Moreover, the monthlies have always
played an important part in the development of Russian
literature. Novels and stories are, as a rule, published in
magazines before appearing in book form. The great novels
of Turgeniev, Dostoievsky, and Tolstoy nearly all made their
first appearance in the " thick journals," as the monthlies
are usually called in Russia, and even now the success of the
monthlies depends upon the ability of the editors to secure
for publication fiction by the most prominent writers of the
day.
The appearance and make-up of the Russian monthlies
are very different from English magazines like the Fort-
nightly or Contemporary. In the first place they are un-
doubtedly " thick." An average number contains from 400
to 800 pages, separate paging being sometimes adopted for
different sections of the magazine. The first section is
devoted to poetry and fiction, original and translated,
9— (2400)
120 Russia of the Russians
including serial novels and short stories which are printed in
larger type than the rest of the magazine. Then follows
a section containing contributed articles on political,
economic, scientific, educational, or literary subjects, the
length of each article varying from sixteen to thirty-two pages
or more of close print. Then follow, in most magazines,
reviews of home politics, foreign politics, and events in the
provinces. The final section is devoted to book-reviews.
There are no illustrations. Magazines of this kind were
particularly serviceable in the pre-constitutional period,
when they served as substitutes for newspapers, public
meetings, and debating societies. As a rule they were well
edited, and maintained a high literary and ethical standard,
stimulated a sound and genuine interest in public questions,
and systematically educated public opinion in a way that
the daily Press was wholly prevented from doing. Perhaps
a lingering tendency to excessive generalisation in the dis-
cussion of public questions is to be explained by the fact
that for years the average Russian reader was accustomed
to observe the march of history in the long perspective of a
monthly review and not through the flashlight of the daily
press, while the events he was permitted to observe were
not the thousand-and-one occurrences at his own doors,
but the broad outlines of movements in distant Western
Europe. During the last few years the development of the
daily press has led to certain modifications of the " thick
journals."
The oldest of the existing monthlies is the Viestnik Yevropy
(Messenger of Europe), founded forty-eight years ago, and
edited for many years by the late M. Stasiulevich. The
Viestnik Yevropy, like the Russkia Viedomosti, is a heritage
of the Liberalism of the sixties, and has throughout maintained
a very honourable tradition of scrupulous fairness, good
taste, and unswerving loyalty to Liberal principle. Among
its contributors were Turgeniev, who printed most of his
later works in the Viestnik Yevropy, another classical novelist,
The Press 121
Goncharov, and such distinguished historians as Kostomarov,
Soloviev (the author of the standard History of Russia),
Ravelin, and Pypin. For the last thirty years M. Ronstantin
Arseniev has conducted the Review of Home Politics in the
magazine with singular tact, ability, and firmness. His
standpoint is that of a broad-minded Liberal hostile to ex-
cesses of every kind. A few years ago the magazine passed
into the hands of Professor Maksim Rovalesky, a sociologist
well known in France and England, who now edits it in
conjunction with M. Arseniev. The Viestnik Yevropy is a
sober, non-party organ of moderate Liberal tendencies, and
it appeals chiefly to Liberal officials and comfortably-off,
middle-aged members of the professional classes.
The Russkaia Mysl (Russian Thought), was founded thirty-
three years ago in Moscow, and was for many years an organ
of a progressive and eclectic type, printing contributions from
most of the prominent writers of the day, irrespective of their
political views. In 1908 M. Peter Struve became editor, and
since then the magazine has been the organ of this most
original of the Russian political thinkers of the present day.
M. Struve, who was at one time a Social Democrat, and
from 1902 to 1905 edited, in Stuttgart and Paris, the organ
of the Liberal Zemstvo Constitutionalists Osvobozhdenie, is a
man of great learning and of uncompromising independence
of thought. He is an enemy of political dogma, of sectarian
ism, of catchwords, and hackneyed phrases. During the last
few years he has waged constant warfare against certain
inveterate mental habits of the Russian intelligentsia, or
progressive educated class, such as an excessive tendency to
negation, and a lack of sense of the State, which, in his view,
largely accounted for the insignificant character of the results
achieved by the Revolutionary movement of a few years ago.
M. Struve's standpoint is now that of a "realist " liberalism,
and he has developed his views in a series of able articles
many of which appeared in the Russkaia Mysl, and have
since been published in book form under the general title of
122 Russia of the Russians
Patriotica. M. Struve was the initiator of a volume of essays
by various writers called Viehi, or " Way marks," which
aroused great interest by the severity of its attacks on the
intelligentsia, and had, for a volume of essays, an unprece-
dented success, running into five editions. In the Russkaia
Mysl M. Struve has gathered around him a band of kindred
spirits, and this magazine is the freshest and most interesting
of all the Russian monthlies. It is now published in St.
Petersburg.
The Russkoe Bogatstvo (Russian Wealth), founded in 1876,
was for many years the most widely-circulated of the Russian
monthly magazines. It was the organ of the Russian Popu-
lists or Agrarian Socialists, one section of whom founded at
the beginning of the present century the Socialist Revolu-
tionary party. Nicholas Mikhailovsky, who edited the maga-
zine from 1895 till his death in 1904, exercised by its means
an enormous influence. In his monthly articles on current
topics he expressed views on all aspects of economics, soci-
ology, and literature, which rapidly became part of the mental
stock-in-trade of the bulk of the Russian intelligentsia. His
writings were of value in their insistence on the necessity of
personal initiative and social service. But in many respects
they had a narrowing effect, and it is the mental attitude
they encouraged that writers like M. Struve are now com-
bating. The most attractive feature of the Russkoe Bogatstvo
is, and always has been, the warm sympathy it displays for
the peasantry. M. Korolenko, a writer of short stories dis-
tinguished by their sincere humanitarian feeling, has for
some years past been a leading member of the editorial staff,
and with him are associated MM. Miakotin and Peshehonov,
leaders of a party known as the Populist Socialists, which
enjoyed a certain prominence during the session of the Second
Duma.
Another Socialist monthly is the Sovremenny Mir (The
Modern World), formerly known as the Mir Bozhy (God's
World), which represents the opponents of the Agrarian
The Press 123
Socialists, the Marxists, or Social Democrats. This magazine
owed its success to the energetic management of its former
proprietress, Madame Davydova, wife of a well-known violon-
cellist and a friend of Rubinstein's. Under Madam Davy-
dova's management the Sovremenny Mir was by no means
exclusively socialistic, and opened its doors wide to contri-
butions from every quarter. Thus M. Miliukov printed in
its pages his Studies in the History of Russian Culture, which,
in their collected form, became the standard work on the
subject. The Sovremenny Mir has of late years declined in
importance, and suffers from the competition of newer Socialist
monthlies like the Sovremennik (The Contemporary), and
Zavety (The Covenants). The subscription price of the large
monthlies, which ranges from nine to fifteen roubles (eighteen
to thirty shillings) a year, sets a definite limit to their circu-
lation, and of late a cheaper type of magazine intended to
appeal to a broader public has made its appearance. Zhizn
dlia vsieh (literally " Life for all," in the sense of Everybody's
Review), is a magazine of this kind, in which the articles and
stories are written in exceedingly simple language adapted
to the comprehension of the average working man and
progressive peasant.
Russian journalism is passing through a very difficult
period of transition. The Press is naturally peculiarly sensi-
tive to the political atmosphere, and the
Changes in character of the present political situation
Journalism. r r .
largely accounts for the limitations of news-
papers and magazines. But non-political influences also
make themselves felt. The whole tone and temper of Russian
life is changing, and this change finds expression in a hun-
dred different ways in journals of all shades of opinion.
Standards are being modified, ideas and ideals cast into the
melting pot. Perhaps one way of describing the change
would be to say that Russian life is far more sophisticated
than it used to be, both in the good and the bad sense.
Less importance is attached to abstract principles and to
124 Russia of the Russians
generalisations of every kind. The demands of real life are
asserting themselves with greater persistence and effect.
Perhaps there is no less idealism than there was, but the stars
of principle are being hitched to ponderous, rumbling waggons
of everyday, cheerless necessity. The events of the last few
years have dissipated fond illusions, or have substituted for
them the chilling illusion that life is not particularly worth
living. The average Russian has, at the best, become cooler
and more hard-headed, and at the worst he has become a
cynic and a sensualist.
The change is clearly reflected in the Press. Writers of
leading articles are more disposed to concentrate their atten-
tion on details of current policy than to assert general prin-
ciples, and this, not only because of administrative pressure,
but because the whole mood of the time is averse from the
reiteration of general principles. There is a certain gain in
this, since sobering contact with reality tends to give a more
practical turn to Russian political thinking and action. But
the position is depressing and uncongenial to the Russian
character, and certainly gives little scope for the display of
journalistic talent. The governing commercial spirit, the
increasing absorption in money-making is also distinctly
affecting journalism. This is not to say that journalism
pays. It does pay a certain limited number of persons, but
under present conditions in Russia a newspaper must be
regarded as rather a losing than a paying concern. Only a
very few papers return big profits, and most proprietors con-
sider themselves lucky if they can make both ends meet.
There are, however, clear indications of a change in this
respect. Business is growing in Russia by leaps and bounds.
Foreign capital is coming into the country, native capital is
growing more modern in its forms of enterprise. Modern
business means advertising, and the advertisement sheets of
the newspaper are far more important than they were a few
years ago. Formerly most Russian papers were purely
political organs, and owed whatever success they enjoyed
The Press 125
to the popularity of their policy. The papers that combined
politics with commerce were the exception. But now the
Press has become responsive to the swifter pulsation of
economic life, and the secret of newspaper success, to judge
by some of the Moscow and provincial papers, seems to lie
in a judicious combination of radical politics with unabashed
commercialism. One thing, however, must be made clear.
There have been cases in which Russian papers have re-
sorted to blackmail, subsidised articles and other methods of
the kind in vogue in many European countries. But the
great majority of Russian newspapers of standing are free
from corruption, and this means a great deal in a country
where the average standard of commercial morality is not
high.
In their growing tendency to sensationalism the news-
papers again reflect a prevailing mood. Twenty or thirty
years ago writers on Russia frequently described Russian
towns as overgrown villages. But the transformation of
these overgrown villages into cities is going on rapidly, and
the simpler tastes of a slower time are being superseded by
the fancies of a jaded city population. Music halls, cafe
chantants, and all kinds of places of amusement are multi-
plying, and the cinematograph every night attracts its
millions throughout the Empire. It cannot be said that a
love of sport is developing in proportion with the passion for
being amused, but football, yachting, and motor sport are
certainly much more popular than they were, and Russia has
had a very acute attack of the aviation fever. Journalism
feels the change. The popular temper is unfavourable to a
tone of sedateness and sobriety in the newspapers. There
is a demand for smart feuilletons, snappy telegrams, and
piquant news items. The chronique scandaleuse, and the
sensational murder, and will forgery trials that have been so
frequent during the last few years afford abundant material,
and the Russian Press is perceptibly assuming a yellowish
tinge. But there is a strong counter tendency in favour of
126 Russia of the Russians
the maintenance of a stricter literary and ethical standard,
and it is very curious to watch the struggle. The struggle
is particularly interesting, because Russia is so big that the
Press will inevitably become an immense power as soon as
the present limitations are removed.
CHAPTER IV
THE INTELLIGENTSIA
What is the Intelligentsia ? The word itself, or some more
or less adequate translation of it, is frequently met with in
the discussion of Russian public affairs, and
The Intelligentsia, it is difficult to understand a great deal in
Russian character and politics unless the
intelligentsia be taken clearly into account. It is practically
a separate class that goes under the name. To describe it
as the educated or the literary class is not sufficient. An
: ' intelligent," or member of the intelligentsia, is not merely
an " intellectual " either. He is that and something more,
and sometimes he is not quite that. There are points of
resemblance between the Russian intelligentsia and the liter-
ary and professional class in other countries, in Germany,
France, Italy, and especially in England. The German
romantic movement of the early part of the last century,
certain aspects of the French Boheme, Fleet Street, Grub
Street, the Labour and Women's Suffrage Movements pre-
sent many analogies with the Russian intelligentsia, but there
is nothing altogether like this class in any part of the world.
Whereas the intellectuals of other countries enter more or
less completely into the life of their environment and con-
form to its rules and customs, the life of the Russian intelli-
gentsia has been hitherto a constant protest against the ex-
isting order. The distinguishing feature of the intelligentsia
was not that its members wrote books and articles or dis-
cussed literary and social questions, but that they did this
in the name of a higher political and social order that was to
replace the existing order. Everything they did was per-
meated with the desire for liberation, for reform. The nature
of the reform required was conceived of differently at different
periods and by various groups. Some dreamed of Russia as a
127
128 Russia of the Russians
land of self-governing communities, of true-hearted Orthodox
Christians under the aegis of the autocracy, others wanted
to make Russia into a federation of Communes without the
autocracy, others proclaimed a reign of science and reason,
denounced all tradition, and, on the strength of such manuals
of crude materialism as Buchner's Kraft und Stoff, declared
poetry, art, and personal beauty to be mere instruments of
reaction. Some advocated Agrarian Socialism, a later
generation preached Marxian Socialism.
It is the subordination of all intellectual effort and indeed
of personal habits to a supreme interest in social reform that
gives the Russian intelligentsia its peculiar colouring, that
constitutes its strength and its weakness. And it is just this
characteristic that makes it possible to mark off the intelli-
gentsia with precision from the rest of the community. Not
every literary man was an " intelligent," though in certain
of his habits and moods, perhaps, even in his convictions, he
might present many points of affinity with the intelligentsia.
Tolstoy was certainly not an intelligent, though at one time
he associated with the literary men in St. Petersburg,
wrote in the " thick journals," and engaged in fierce disputes
on general topics. But the type did not appeal to him, and
he rarely described it in his novels, approaching it only when
a class that did interest him — the country gentlemen, for
instance, as in Anna Karenina — happened to be in a
frame of mind corresponding with that of the intelligentsia,
and argued hotly on political questions. And Tolstoy's
religious views were repugnant to the majority of the intelli-
gentsia, just as the intelligentsia habit of mind was repug-
nant to him. Turgeniev, again, was not an intelligent. He
was keenly interested in the intelligentsia, associated with,
and frequently described in his novels, its members. His
heroes, Rudin, in the novel of the same name, Bazarov, in
Fathers and Sons, and most of the characters in Smoke are
intelligents. But Turgeniev described them as an outsider,
as a highly cultivated country gentleman who would never
The Intelligentsia 129
quite consent to identify himself with the intelligentsia class.
Dostoievsky again, was, and was not, an intelligent. He
was a townsman, and lived like a typical intelligent, a restless,
hand-to-mouth, irregular life, among debts and manuscripts,
and with long nights of heated argument. Yet the intelli-
gentsia did not claim him as its own, and not until many years
after his death did it fully and ungrudgingly recognise his
genius.
In fact, literary or artistic genius or a devotion to literary
and aesthetic, rather than to social and political interests,
very frequently had the effect of placing a man outside the
pale of the intelligentsia in the strictest sense of the word.
This section of the community bore the character of a religi-
ous body rather than that of a literary class. Its attitude
resembled that of the Puritans and their successors, Quakers,
Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists. It had a Noncon-
formist conscience. Only the ideal pursued was not that of
the salvation of the individual soul — for nearly four decades
the majority of the Russian intelligentsia did not believe in
the existence of the soul — but the salvation of Russia, the
salvation of the people. It was an ideal of social and per-
sonal liberty that demanded constant personal service and
the subordination of all other interests to its attainment.
It involved intense humanitarianism, an enthusiastic attach-
ment to the common people, because they were common
people, because they were poor, oppressed, and suffering.
" From those who exult and foolishly chatter and dye their
hands in blood," wrote Nekrasov, the typical poet of the
intelligentsia, " lead me away to the camp of those who are
perishing for the great cause of love."
Ethical fervour, constant devotion, even in the darkest
days of oppression, to an ideal of political and social redemp-
tion, immense personal sacrifices, contempt for the goods of
this world — these were the noble qualities that gave the in-
telligentsia its power and constitutes its claim to profound
respect. These were the qualities which, together with a
130 Russia of the Russians
genuine and unflagging thirst for knowledge, a delight in
ideas for their own sake, a restless and widely-ranging mental
activity, and a desire to impart enlightenment to the weakest
and the humblest, made the intelligentsia the pioneers of
Russian development during the last century. As against
the hard mechanical conception of the despotic state, the
corruption of the bureaucracy, and the systematic suppres-
sion of personal initiative, the intelligents' self-sacrificing
insistence on the necessity of knowledge, justice, and liberty,
and on high ethical and social values had the force of a sturdy
and resolute witness-bearing. The members of the intelli-
gentsia were constantly imbued with the sense of a mission.
Some were revolutionaries, some carried on clandestine propa-
ganda in Russia, others worked and organised abroad. But
the majority remained at home and worked openly. Of
these some sat in the cities, taught in schools and univer-
sities, wrote in the " thick journals," read German, French,
and English science and philosophy, argued, disputed, criti-
cised. Others worked in the Zemstvos as doctors or agri-
cultural experts, or as school teachers in the villages, or
opened little libraries for the people whenever they could
wring permission from the Administration, carried on a con-
stant struggle with the authorities on points of law in order
to gain a little clear space, some slight opportunities for
imparting knowledge to the peasantry, or for helping the
suffering, worked devotedly in Famine Relief and served as
doctors and nurses in time of war. Women worked side by
side with men on a basis of complete equality, and frequently
were leaders in organisation ; in fact, one of the remarkable
features of the intelligentsia was the number of strong and
able women it brought to the front. And in all the work
predominated the feeling of a duty to be done, of a debt to
be paid to the people. It was a kind of religious service, and
this, though the majority of the intelligents demonstratively
claimed to be atheists, and professed a rigid and
uncompromising materialism.
The Intelligentsia 131
Many of the defects of the intelligents naturally flowed
from their qualities. Dogmatism, narrowness, and a cen-
sorious spirit were common. Frequently an idealist con-
tempt for the goods of this world, and hostility to aestheti-
cism, degenerated into personal untidiness and slovenliness
in the conduct of personal affairs. Sincerity was often in-
terpreted as meaning indifference to the amenities of social
intercourse, identification with the interests of the people
was often considered to mean not only the adoption of a
peasant costume, but also an intentional roughness of manner.
The bitterness of the struggle with the autocracy engendered
intolerance, an impatience of others' opinions. And difference
of opinion on political or literary questions was frequently re-
garded as morally reprehensible. The man who did not conform
to the prevailing attitude of the intelligentsia was looked upon
with suspicion, if he displayed indications of attachment to
the Church or other traditional institutions he was shunned
as a reactionary. Intolerance extended even to trifles. A
few years ago a literary man, who happened to be a landed
proprietor, brought his wife to a gathering of a radical liter-
ary group with which he was connected. His wife was
coldly received, and it afterwards appeared that the cause of
offence was that she wore diamond earrings.
Again the devotion of the intelligentsia to theory, especially
to the latest philosophical and social theories of France and
Germany blunted the sense of reality and made the average
Russian even more unpractical than he was compelled to be
through lack of any opportunity for action. He saw the
march of events through a haze of hypothesis and logical
syllogism. In long and noisy disputes around the samovar
in rooms clouded with cigarette smoke he analysed political
occurrences from various philosophical and sociological stand-
points, estimating their significance from the point of view
of a remote ideal, but very often missing their immediate
impact on sensibility. An enormous amount of time and
energy was wasted in solving mere verbal misunderstandings.
132 Russia of the Russians
The intelligentsia tended to lose sight of colour, action,
spontaneous movement, the play of the instincts, the simple
elemental process of living. It evaded nature. It theorised
even when of set purpose it returned to Nature and founded
Tolstoyan colonies. The very simplicity of the intelligents'
manner of life and their good-natured habits of mutual help
freed them from the insistent pressure of economic demands
in an extreme form. They lived remote from the world, as
it were, on an island. It was never absolutely necessary for
them to be business-like, and the conditions were not such
as to encourage habits of punctuality. There was even a
prejudice against a business-like habit of mind, it was con-
sidered petty and " bourgeois," and indicative of an exces-
sive desire for material welfare. Theory dominated over
life, and profoundly influenced personal habits, dress, the
training of children, the relations between husband and wife.
It even influenced the speech of daily life, making it bookish,
abstract, and colourless, depriving it of that wealth of imagery
which makes the language of the Russian common people a
delight to hear. The dominance of sociological theories also
affected literary taste, and works of art were judged from
the standpoint of social utility, rather than from that of
beauty. " Aesthetics are the Cain who killed his brother
Abel, Ethics," declared the critic Mikhailovsky, who for
many years held sway over the minds of a large proportion
of the Russian intelligentsia. Critics paid attention mainly
to the political and social content of the works they studied,
demanded realism pure and simple, and condemned the play
of fancy. In a popular History of Literature, published a few
years ago, considerable space is devoted to the discussion of
the social and political ideas in the work of the poet Alexis
Tolstoy, an aristocrat and a lover of beauty, who held aloof
from politics. Chehov, a shrewd, sceptical, and talented
writer of short stories, who was bored by the " thick journals,"
and shunned the intelligentsia, died in 1904. In 1906, after
the promulgation of the Constitution and the formation of
The Intelligentsia 133
political parties, a literary critic in a public lecture, discussed
the question as to which party Chehov would have joined if
he had been alive, and came to the conclusion that he would
probably have been a Constitutional Democrat.
Sometimes the reign of dogma, the habit of holding reality
at a distance by means of theory led to a certain insincerity.
The very gregariousness of the intelligentsia made this inevit-
able. There was a great deal of mere lip allegiance to cur-
rent doctrine. By no means every member of the intelli-
gentsia did his thinking for himself ; many lived solely on
borrowed ideas, and frequently disputes were a mere bandy-
ing of authorities. Mikhailovsky, Chernishevsky, Marx,
Engels, Spencer, Buckle, Nietzsche were names that con-
stantly did duty for arguments. And then human nature
would have its way in spite of dogma. To wear evening
dress would have been considered by most members of the
intelligentsia an indication of degraded bourgeois taste. But
it was one time the custom among literary men not to shave,
and to wear the hair long, and some were distinctly foppish
in the attention they paid to their coiffure. Many in their
sturdy democracy refused to wear starched shirts, and pre-
ferred the blouse as worn by the Russian peasant and work-
ing man. But an inextinguishable aesthetic instinct dis-
played itself in the choice of striking colours for the blouse
or in embroidery on the breast, at the waist or on the fringes.
And when a girl student wore her hair short and incessantly
smoked cigarettes, she did so not simply to defy convention,
but because in her set it was the thing to do, just as in
another set which she abhorred, it was the thing to go to
balls and wear evening dress. It would be a mistake, too,
to imagine that gatherings of the intelligentsia were devoted
solely to disputes on abstract questions. Three or four
might argue hotly, while other . would simply exchange im-
pressions, or dutifully submit to be bored, or gossip as easily
and as pleasantly as human beings gossip the world over,
from Notting Hill to Hong Kong. The life of the intelligents
134 Russia of the Russians
was simple, but not ascetic. Many members drank to ex-
cess, and there were some who drank themselves to death
in search of a refuge from the terrible depression that hung
constantly over the Russian educated man, and made the
life of the intelligentsia essentially a sad one.
One may easily do injustice to the intelligentsia by empha-
sising certain of its aspects that lend themselves to satire and
to caricature. Such aspects were sharply characterised by
Turgeniev in his Smoke, and ferociously condemned by
Dostoievsky in his novel The Possessed. The intelligentsia,
though a distinct and separate class, was by no means alto-
gether of a piece. There were extremists and moderates,
there were various parties and a great diversity of types of
character. The Symbolist writers and advocates of Art for
Art's sake, who made their appearance towards the end of
the nineteenth century, were members of the intelligentsia,
although they were violently attacked by the prevailing
school. So were many Slavophils, and convinced and deeply
religious supporters of the Church, and opponents of philo-
sophical materialism. In the homes of some members of
the intelligentsia there was a gracious and soothing tradition
of real culture combined with a refinement of manner that
was the more charming because of its absolute sincerity. In
other homes there was occasionally a depressing crudity of
thought and speech and a noisy self-assertiveness. But all
members of the intelligentsia were united by a common
temper, by a profound sense of life as a problem, and by a
constantly thwarted and baffled desire to find ultimate
solutions.
The intelligentsia occupies, or has until now occupied,
such a strictly delimited position in Russian life that it must,
as has been pointed out, be regarded as a distinct social
class. Officially there are five classes in the Empire, the gentry,
the merchants, the clergy, the mieschhane, or petite bourgeoise,
and the peasantry. In the early part of the last century
literature was almost exclusively the business of the gentry,
The Intelligentsia 135
but from the sixties onward representatives of the other
classes, students of theological seminaries, artisans, mer-
chants' sons, and peasants gathered round the literary month-
lies and took their place among the intelligentsia. The Uni-
versity system, adapted by the Government from the German
system, made it possible for most clever youths who had suc-
ceeded in fighting their way through the secondary schools
to pass through a course of higher education, and it was the
universities which filled the ranks of the intelligentsia. The
development of higher education for women, the opening of
Women's University Colleges and Medical Schools, largely
increased the number of women in the literary and profes-
sional class. Not only were various social classes represented
in the intelligentsia, but there was a sprinkling of non-Russian
nationalities. There was a considerable number of Jews, and
there were also Little Russians and a few Poles, and a certain
number of Armenians and Georgians. The intelligentsia also
included Government officials of Liberal or Radical views, and,
in fact, there were a good many points of contact between
the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia. Those same higher
educational institutions which constituted a recruiting ground
for the intelligentsia, gave the Government a constant supply
of officials. And in certain respects the intelligentsia's habit
of mind was akin to that of the bureaucracy, especially in
its abstract character, its faith in the virtue of words and
formulas, and of schemes set down on paper.
In writing of the intelligentsia the past tense is almost
unavoidable, because of the great changes that have taken
place in the class during the last few years. The Revolution
brought the intelligentsia into rude and sudden contact with
reality, put its dogmas and doctrines to the severest possible
test. Doctrines were brushed aside by elemental forces, and
instincts dulled by an inveterate habit of generalisation
failed to respond adequately and decisively to the startling
appeal of facts. The intelligentsia has been bitterly blamed
for the failure of the Constitutional movement and for the
io — (2400)
136 Russia of the Russians
triumph of reaction, but it would be unfair to make it re-
sponsible for what was largely historically inevitable. Con-
sidering the enforced isolation from real life to which the
intelligentsia was condemned in the pre-constitutional period,
it is difficult to see how it could have developed in a high
degree the qualities of practical efficiency. It was only in
the Zemstvos and Municipal Councils that it had an oppor-
tunity for administrative training, and it is significant that
it is the Zemstvos that have given some of the most capable
and practical workers in the broad field of Imperial politics.
But in any case the political turmoil of the last ten years
has made the Russian intelligentsia something very different
from what it was. It has lost its exclusiveness. It is no
longer so distinctively a class apart. Its members engage
more frequently in practical work. Some are deputies, some
have gone into business. In spite of the reaction, a steady
social and economic development is in progress, and in this
development the intellectuals are taking their share. Hun-
dreds are living in exile or in banishment abroad, and over
such the traditions of the pre-constitutional period still have
a strong hold. Faith in many of the dogmas of the intelli-
gentsia has been profoundly shaken, and perplexity and a
spirit of scepticism prevails. And at the same time certain
new tendencies are making themselves felt, nationalism as
opposed to the once prevalent cosmopolitanism, a new sense
of the State as opposed to the former negative attitude of the
intelligentsia to the State as an organism, and to State action
of every kind, and also a growing respect for religious senti-
ment in its various manifestations as opposed to the agres-
sive materialism that was once so common. Political parties
have, to a certain extent, taken the place of the intelligentsia
and the intellectuals seem little by little, in spite of very
unfavourable conditions, to be taking their place in a broader
national life. They seem, in fact, to be in process of becoming
intellectuals of the German or English type. x
But the traditions of a century of lofty and disinterested
The Intelligentsia 137
thinking, of loyalty to great ideas, of struggle and of sacrifice
are still fresh and vivid, the traditions of the first Russian
critic Bielinsky and his successors, Dobroliubov, Lavrov, and
Mikhailovsky, of that penetrating political thinker Herzen,
of the tumultuous anarchist Bakunin, of Turgeniev and
Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, and of the idealist Slavophils
Aksakov, Kireev, and Homiakov. The band of high-minded,
enlightened, humane, and keenly sensitive men who passed
through the strange and bitter experience of living under an
autocracy, while the Europe of the nineteenth century made
its triumphant progress — these were the men who made the
Russian intelligentsia what it is. And such an intelligentsia
cannot wholly disappear, can never become exactly like the
intellectuals of any country in the world.
CHAPTER V
CHURCH AND PEOPLE
" Holy Russia," the Empire is called, and the troops of the
Tsar are his " Christ-loving army." The slow train stops at
a wayside station, and among the grey cot-
The Church, tages on the hillside rises a white church
hardly supporting the weight of a heavy
blue cupola. The train approaches a great city, and from
behind factory chimneys cupolas loom up, and when the
factory chimneys are passed it is the domes and belfries of
the churches that dominate the city. " Set yourselves in
the shadow of the sign of the Cross, O Russian folk of true
believers," is the appeal that the Crown makes to the people
at critical moments in its history. With these words began
the Manifesto of Alexander II announcing the emancipation
of the serfs. And these same words were used by those
mutineers on the battleship Potemkin who appeared before
Odessa in 1905. The symbols of the Orthodox Church are
set around Russian life like banners, like ancient watch-
towers. The Church is an element in the national conscious-
ness. It enters into the details of life, moulds custom, main-
tains a traditional atmosphere to the influence of which a
Russian, from the very fact that he is a Russian, involuntarily
submits. A Russian may, and most Russian intelligents do,
deny the Church in theory, but in taking his share in the
collective life of the nation he, at many points, recognises
the Church as a fact. More than that. In those border-
lands of emotion that until life's end evade the control of
toilsomely acquired personal conviction, the Church retains
a foothold, yielding only slowly and in the course of generations
to modern influences. Or it may happen, and often does
happen, that the intelligent in his eager intellectual search,
138
Church and People 139
in his ardour of social service is suddenly caught away by a
current of religious feeling which combines with nationalist
instinct to draw him back into the Church. A strangely
complex institution is the Orthodox Church and very subtle
are its influences.
A Russian heads his letters with a date thirteen days later
than that recognised by the rest of the civilised world simply
because the Church, on purely traditional and irrational
grounds, insists on the maintenance of the Old Style. He
may protest against the anachronism, and if he has strong
feelings on the subject he may use the New Style as well as
the Old, heading his letters with such a complex date as
December 28, 1912, January 10, 1913. But he cannot aban-
don the Old Style for the simple reason that it is observed
in all public transactions, in banks and Government offices.
A high school boy may be a devoted admirer of Nietzsche
or Marx, but he knows perfectly well which saints' days in
the year mean a whole holiday. The average Russian in-
telligent does not dream of going to church on Sundays, and
of priests on the whole he has an exceedingly poor opinion.
But at certain important moments of his life he invokes
the Church's aid. He goes to church to be married, and
before marriage confession and communion are necessary.
The priest christens his children, and every Orthodox Russian
bears the name of a saint, Greek, Jewish, Roman, or Russian.
And when he dies priest and deacon again come into his
home and sing a mass for the repose of his soul, and after-
wards, with solemn and touching ceremony commit his body
to the ground. There is one great festival of the year in
which all Russians, whatever be their standing or opinions,
joyfully take part. Nowhere is Easter celebrated with such
tremulous intensity of feeling as in Russia.
But it is just because the Church occupies such a con-
spicuous position in public life that it is difficult to determine
the real attitude of the people to religion. The Russian
people seem decorously and deeply religious. A cabman
140 Russia of the Russians
bares his head and crosses himself when he passes church or
shrine. A merchant in a tramcar will suddenly cease reading
the city column in his morning paper and bow and cross
himself reverently because of a passing funeral. In every
cathedral in St. Petersburg and Moscow, at all hours of the
day, women are kneeling before the sacred pictures, bowing
to the ground and whispering endless prayers. A Russian
peasant crosses himself before and after eating, crosses him-
self when he sets out on a railway journey and before he re-
tires to rest. In nearly every Russian house ikons or sacred
pictures hang in the corners, and before them tiny lamps
with floating wicks are constantly burning. But over against
these facts stand others equally characteristic, such as the
prevalence of drunkenness, and the fact that not in England,
France, or Germany is it possible to hear in the public streets
such an astonishing variety of bad language as in Russia.
In attempting to define the Russian people's attitude to
religion one may easily slip and stumble. But of its attitude
to the Church as an institution the routine of daily living
gives abundant illustrations.
In its most intimate connection with the people the Church
is represented by the village priest far more than by metro-
politan, archbishop, or archimandrite, and
The Village infinitely more than by the Holy Synod with
its lay Chief Procurator. The village priest
represents the living continuity of ecclesiastical tradition.
He has not an easy life. He receives a salary paid by the
Treasury through the Synod of from about £15 to £30 a
year. He has a parsonage and glebe land, sometimes barely
enough for a vegetable garden, sometimes enough to keep a
horse and a few cows on, and to grow produce for sale. The
salary is eked out by various fees from the parishioners, amount-
ing in all from £50 to £90 a year according to the size of the
parish. For a christening peasants pay from sixpence to a
shilling, for a wedding from a pound upwards. But "the
priest must provide out of his own pocket for the lighting of
Church and People 141
the church for the wedding and the warm wine that bride
and bridegroom drink after communion. And if the birth
certificates of the pair are not in the priest's keeping and
have to be copied from the registers of another parish he
must have them copied and forwarded at his own expense.
For a funeral the fee is from six to ten shillings. And then
there are endless small fees. Three times a year, at Christ-
mas, Epiphany and Easter, the priest makes the round of
the parish, and holds a short service in every house. For
each visit he receives from threepence to a shilling. For the
mass sung for the repose of the soul which the relatives order
on the twentieth or fortieth day after the decease, the fee is
from fourpence to sixpence. For every service, in fact, held
by the priest at the request of the parishioners, over and
above the regular services on Sundays and the appointed
Church Festivals, he receives a trifling fee. Under such con-
ditions the questions of fees may easily become a source of
friction between priest and parishioners, and it is not surprising
that the village priest is often close-fisted and grasping.
Questions of ways and means, of kopeks and roubles harass
the village priest continually. The fees he receives he must
share with the deacon, for every priest in holding a service
must be aided by a deacon, or an unordained assistant called
a psalomshchik or cantor, who chants the responses. But
the priest's wife helps him to solve the economic problem,
for, as a rule, she is an excellent housekeeper. The clergy
form a caste apart, priests and deacons marry the daughters
of priests and deacons, and it very often happens that an
old priest on retiring passes his parish on to his son-in-law.
The priest's wife brings with her a tradition of good house-
keeping that has been handed down in the families of the
clergy from generation to generation. She knows well how
to bake the cabbage or meat pasties that batiushka, the
Little Father, loves, how to cure ham, to salt cabbage and
cucumbers, to make all kinds of jams, kvass, cherry, rasp-
berry and black currant brandy, and birthday cakes and
142 Russia of the Russians
sweets for Easter. She sews and embroiders blouses for the
boys and dresses for the girls, and sees that all the children
have warm felt boots in the winter, and the boys high leather
boots and the girls shoes in the summer. The family is
always a large one, and means are very limited, but somehow
the popadia, the priest's wife, manages to make ends meet,
and her cheerful bustle and constant forethought make the
problem of life, which for the village priest is not at all meta-
physical, but consists in an unceasing pressure of petty cares,
less harassing than it might otherwise be. If she dies leaving
little children, the lot of the widower is a hard one, for the
Russian priest may not marry a second time.
The children's education is well provided for. After learn-
ing the elements from father or mother at home or in the
parish school, the boys are sent to the head town of the
government to the School for the Sons of the Clergy where
they are educated free of charge, and the girls to the Epar-
chial or Diocesan School for Girls where teaching and board
are also free. The instruction given in these schools is very
ecclesiastical in character. Modern languages are not taught,
but a great deal of attention is paid to Church Slavonic,
Church Music, Divine Service, and Church History. The boys
are educated with a view to their becoming clergymen, and
the girls with a view to their becoming clergymen's wives.
From the School for the Sons of the Clergy the boys may
pass into a Theological Seminary where they are trained for
the priesthood. But only a small proportion of priests' sons
follow their father's profession. Many become clerks in
various Government offices, some, either by their own efforts
or aided by their father's scanty savings, make their way to
the University or Technical Colleges and so into the various
lay professions. The number of seminarists who enter the
priesthood is lessening year by year, and the question of
rilling the vacancies is becoming a serious one in many parts
of Russia. Priests' daughters after leaving the Eparchial
School either return to their homes, where they stay until
Church and People 143
their marriage with some young deacon or priest, or else
become teachers in the parish schools or in the Eparchial
School itself. Some break through the magical ecclesiastical
circle and go to the cities to continue their education in the
Women's University College or Medical College, or in one of
the numerous Kursy, courses of lectures or higher schools,
pedagogical or technical, or in language schools, in dentists',
nurses', or medical assistants' training schools. And then
they become country school teachers or doctors, or find them-
selves suddenly deported to Siberia for having joined a
socialistic organisation, or simply marry a student and share
his adventurous lot.
The priest's home life is full of cares and anxieties, but it
makes him very human, gives him a very real sympathy with
the cares of his peasant parishioners which are, after all, in
their petty, harassing, economic character, very like his own.
But there are the broader cares, the business of the parish,
the care of souls, and these lie heavily upon the zealous pastor.
The ways of his ministry are definitely appointed and strictly
regulated. His duty is to be the faithful instrument of a
complex tradition. First of all, he has regularly to hold
service in the little parish church and in outlying chapels.
But to hold services is not a simple matter. Walking down
the village street in a low-crowned hat and blue cassock with
a cross on his breast, bearded, long-haired, he is simply the
village " pope," Batiushka, the Little Father, Father Nikon,
Vasili or Michael. But when he enters the church, dons his
robe of cloth-of-gold, and the altar doors open, and he
comes out before the assembled congregation chanting and
swinging a censer in the smoke of which the sacred pictures
in their glittering frames take fantastic forms, and the shadows
within the altar become full of mystery, then Father Vasili
becomes another being, a priest, with powers of which some
intimation is given in the sad, sweet, slowly rising and falling
tones of the choir, the familiar but solemn Slavonic words
of the prayers and the sonorous responses of the deacon.
144 Russia of the Russians
The Church touches the peasants in some way hard to define.
They stand in rows, the men on the right, the women on the
left, with folded hands, listening to the music and chanting,
and gazing at the sacred pictures of the Saviour, the Madonna,
St. George, St. Nicholas the Wonder-worker, or the worn,
stern, ascetic face of St. Sergius Radonezhsky. They bow
and kneel when the priest bids them do so, and often bow
and cross themselves when a wailing note in the music, a
name, a phrase in the prayers makes a sudden appeal. Some-
times the women or a pilgrim near the door kneel and bow
ecstatically, touching the floor with their foreheads and
whispering, Gospodi pomilui (Lord have mercy). The priest
closes the altar doors and disappears from view, opens them
again and reads the gospel for the day, turns his back to the
congregation and bows low before the altar. There is no
break in the service, choir and deacon take up the burden
when the priest's voice ceases, and in that world of strangely
vibrating and plaintive utterance the peasant congregation
is held for two hours or more until at last the end of the mass
is reached, and the priest advances holding out the Cross,
and the parishioners throng round to kiss it and to receive a
blessing.
Rarely does the village priest preach a sermon or attempt
to make the church service a vehicle of religious instruction.
The mass is a direct appeal to the emotions, and what the
congregation chiefly demands from the priest is that he shall
; ' serve well," that is to say, that he should have a good
voice, a good ear, and that he should be able to carry through
without blundering the complex ritual with its incessant
demand for vigilance in detail. A good priest must be able
to serve well not only in the routine of low masses, but in
high masses on the great festivals, in the Liturgy of St. Basil
the Great and other Lenten liturgies, and in the Christmas
and Easter services. It is the Easter service that puts on
the village priest the heaviest strain. For six weeks he has
been fasting, refraining absolutely from meat, eggs, and milk
A FIFTEENTH CENTURY VILLAGE CHURCH, PAPERTNO
(Novgorod Government)
Church and People 145
products, and rarely eating fish. There are many extra services
in Lent, and he must confess his parishioners one by one. Holy
Week is the most difficult week of all with its incessant
prayers and its atmosphere of deep gloom, and when Easter
Eve comes Father Vasili is thin and pale and his eyes have
a febrile brightness. Winter is over, ice and snow have
melted, the trees are still leafless, the fields black and bare,
and the wind is chilly, but there is a sense of coming Spring
in the air. The service begins two hours before midnight.
All the peasants of the neighbourhood are there, and the
schoolmaster, the village tradesman, the gentry of the parish
and, it may be, a few passing artisans and tramps. Up till
midnight the music is low and dreary. Then there is a
restless movement. Every member of the congregation
lights a candle. Youths fire off guns on the church steps.
The priest and deacon advance toward the door, peasants
grasp the ikons and church banners, and with candles, ikons,
and banners, and with singing the congregation walks out
into the churchyard and in procession around the church.
Before they re-enter the priest cries, " Christ is risen." The
congregation answers, "He is risen indeed ! " The choir
breaks into joyful singing and the happy mass of Easter
morning begins. After the service is over the priest must
bless the kulichi, Easter cakes, and the ftaskha, a sweetmeat
made of sour milk, eggs, and sugar, which the peasant women
have brought to church with them. Then come the days of
visitation and feasting, long journeys from village to village,
with prayers in each cottage, and here a glass of tea with
kulich and paskha, and there a glass of vodka, so that often
at the end of a long day from weariness and from much
eating and drinking after the long fast priest and deacon
are barely able to mumble the words of the prayers.
So the year goes round with its long calendar of fasts and
feasts in all of which the priest must take the leading part.
There are four great fasts, Lent, which lasts seven weeks,
including Maslanitsa, Butter or Carnival Week, when, though
146 Russia of the Russians
milk, butter, and eggs are permitted, meat is forbidden ;
the fast of the Assumption of the Virgin, which lasts two
weeks, the fast before St. Peter's Day, and the fast before
Christmas, which lasts from November 14 until Christmas
Eve. The priest must observe these fasts even if others are
negligent, and he must also fast weekly on Wednesdays and
Fridays. Then there are the extra services, on the day of
the patron saint of the village, for instance, or in time of
drought when priest and peasants go into the fields to pray
for rain, or on a day on which the village community has
vowed to hold service in honour of a saint who has stayed
an epidemic among the cattle or in some way brought an
answer to prayers. There are prayers to be said, too, when
the cattle are driven out to pasture in spring, and there are
name-days when special services are sometimes ordered by
the more well-to-do families, and panikhidy, or masses for
the repose of the souls of the deceased, and akathists, or
hymns in honour of the Saviour, the Virgin, and the Saints,
to be sung on special occasions. To carry out the purely
ritual duties of his profession is for the village priest no
light task.
Another important part of his duties is to explain the mean-
ing of this ritual. It would be a mistake to imagine that the
peasants' experience in the Church is nothing more than a vague,
aesthetic emotion. They have certain religious conceptions
which are formed partly from words in the service which
they vaguely understand, more rarely from the reading of the
Gospel and lives of the saints, partly from the floating mass
of custom and legend, and partly from direct instruction.
Instruction is given by the priests to the children in the
parish schools maintained by the Holy Synod, and also in
the Zemstvo schools and those maintained by the Ministry
of Public Instruction. In these schools the children are
taught to read Church Slavonic when they are barely able
to read Russian, which is very much as though English,
children were taught to read Wycliffe's Bible in the infant
Church and People 147
classes. Church Slavonic is a slightly modified form of the
Bulgarian language as spoken about the ninth century in
the neighbourhood of Serres in Macedonia, and as used in
the translation of the scriptures made by the Slavonic mis-
sionaries, Cyril and Methodius, and in the services of the
Orthodox Church. The alphabet is different from the Russian,
and there are many words, grammatical forms and phonetic
combinations which are not to be found in the Russian
language. Church Slavonic as taught in the parish schools
certainly does not develop the intelligence of Russian children,
but some learn enough to catch a good many fragments of
meaning in the words of the Church Service. The priest
gives instruction in Catechism and Church History, too, but
it is only a rare pastor who succeeds in making these dry
bones live. The religious instruction given in the schools is,
as a rule, a numbing, deadening thing, and probably con-
tributes far less to the formation of the people's religious
conceptions than the reading of the lives of the saints or the
stories of wandering " brothers," or the talks of pilgrims
during long journeys on foot to the great shrines. For the
Russian people talk about religious questions, are perpetually
interested in them, in some restless, probing way of their
own.
The personal character of the priest counts for a great
deal in the life of the parish. " Like pope, like parish," is a
Russian saying. Sometimes priests are hopelessly ignorant
and stupid, and hold their position in spite of obvious in-
capacity only through the protection of powerful relatives.
Sometimes they give way to drink and, as a rule, priests do
not by their example encourage abstinence in their flocks.
In the North priests have the reputation of being grasping,
and in the South where parishes are smaller and glebe-lands
larger and more fertile, they are accused of indolence and
moral laxity. The average priest is neither conspicuously
devout nor conspicuously negligent. He is a hearty fellow
with a broad accent, rather overburdened by the cares of
148 Russia of the Russians
his office and by family cares, not keenly intelligent, but
shrewd, observant, with common sense and humour. He is
not interested in theoretical questions, is sincere in his religi-
ous beliefs, takes the world as he finds it, and feels thoroughly
at home in it, and able to enjoy its good things when they
come to him. Often he subscribes to a city newspaper and
follows in his evening leisure the course of events in the big
world. He has the peasant's liking for foreign politics and
is always glad to launch into a vague and placid discussion
of the Panama Canal question, or the plans of the German
Emperor, or the Suffragette movement in England. There
are not a few priests who delight in their office, who are full
of a warm and simple faith, and who toil in poor parishes
all their lives long without any other object than that of
doing good. The wonder, considering all the conditions of
service, is not that there are so few good priests, but that
there are so many of them.
For the position of the village priest is greatly complicated
by his relations with his superiors and with the outside world
generally. He is under constant observation, is subject to
perpetual interference. His immediate concern is with the
Blagochinny, or superintendent, usually the incumbent of a
large and well-to-do parish, who has oversight over several
neighbouring parishes and keeps watch over the behaviour
of the priests, inquires into their complaints, examines the
parish registers, and investigates the financial affairs of each
parish, which are managed by the priest in conjunction with
an elective church elder and a parish council. On all these
matters the Blagochinny reports to the bishop of the diocese
or his assistants. Sometimes appeal is made directly by
parishioners to the bishop in the head town of the govern-
ment. But the oversight of the Blagochinny concerns not
only the spiritual and economical affairs of the parish. It
has a political object also. The Russian Church is subject
to the State. Above the village priest is a hierarchy of
canons, bishops, and archbishops, and the three Metropolitans
Church and People 149
of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev. But this hierarchy is
under the control of a lay institution, the Holy Synod, into
which Metropolitans and Bishops enter as members, but of
which the Oberprocuror or Chief Procurator, a layman, and
member of the Cabinet, is the head. There is a striking
contrast between the German title for the Minister for the
Church and the traditional Byzantine terminology employed
in ecclesiastical ritual. The Synod is, in fact, a foreign
institution. It was established by Peter the Great in con-
nection with his general reform of administrative institutions
and was formed on Protestant models. The office of Patri-
arch, who was head of the Russian Church during the Moscow
period, and who occupied a position corresponding with that
of the Patriarchs of other autocephalous Eastern churches
was abolished, experience in Moscow having demonstrated
that the power of the Patriarch might rival that of the Tsar.
And Peter, who was determined to maintain the authority
of the State at all costs, forced the Church into the rigid
framework of his bureaucratic system. It was characteristic
of him that in the ancient monastery of St. Michael in the
Ukraine he set the Imperial arms, the double-headed eagle,
above the golden cross that surmounted the cupola.
The Church has thus become a bureaucratic institution.
And the village priest is made constantly to feel that he is
not only a servant of the Church, but a subordinate member
of the bureaucracy, a Government official. He is responsible
for the conduct of the parish school, for instance, which is
maintained by the Holy Synod. But the parish school is
frowned on by progressive people in the neighbourhood, and
the priest often comes into conflict with Zemstvo employees
and country gentlemen on this account. Often, too, the
priest is compelled to play the part of an informer. If there
is a Zemstvo school in his parish he must note the behaviour
of the teacher, report on his or her political opinions, give
warning to the authorities if the teacher lends books freely
to the peasants or converses with them on political subjects.
150 Russia of the Russians
If the young men of his parish display public enterprise,
organise a fire brigade or a co-operative society, it often
happens that the priest is set to watch their movements and
to place impediments in their way. The position of the
priests has been especially trying in this respect during the
last few years of political conflict. They are constantly
associated with the uriadniks or rural policemen in the sup-
pression of manifestations of political sentiment disagreeable
to the Government. The priests are torn between the fear
of endless conflict with their parishioners on political grounds,
and the fear of incurring the displeasure of their superiors.
Many simply obey orders, become informers and zealous
members of the reactionary parties, and try to secure their
position within the parish by arousing fanatical reactionary
feeling among the peasantry. The better men suffer bitterly
in a perpetual conflict between conscience and administra-
tive compulsion. Political pressure on the priesthood reached
its culminating point in the electoral campaign of 1912, when
the Holy Synod, in order to secure a reactionary majority
in the Duma, mobilised the priests in support of the reaction-
ary candidates. The plan failed because a great many
priests, shocked at the profanation of their office for elec-
tioneering purposes, simply voted as they were told not to
and risked the consequences. In all four Dumas priests
have been among the deputies, but those who, in the first
two Dumas, spoke or voted against the Government — like
the devout and earnest Viatka priest, Father Tikhvinsky,
who in the name of Christianity protested against capital
punishment — have been unfrocked as a penalty, and have,
with great difficulty, made their way into other professions.
In the Third and Fourth Dumas most of the priests have been
members of the reactionary parties.
The position of the village priest is typical of that of the
whole of the Russian clergy. There are differences of wealth
and position. In the country the priest's life is very like
the peasant's. In small towns he has to do almost
Church and People 151
exclusively with artisans, small tradesmen, and minor officials.
In the larger towns his lot is thrown among the merchants,
who hold fast to traditional observances closely interwoven
with ecclesiastical ritual. Then there are differences deter-
mined by the character of various towns. The priest in
charge of some ancient chapel in the sleepy, deserted city of
Novgorod naturally leads a life very different from that of
the incumbent of a parish in a busy, modern seaport like
Odessa. In districts where other confessions are strongly
represented, in Catholic Poland, for instance, amongst the
Mohammedans on the Volga, or in districts where dissent
prevails, the office of the Orthodox priest assumes a militant
nationalist character. In the capitals, again, the priests live
the hurried, nervous life of a cosmopolitan world. The in-
cumbents of the larger churches receive a good income, while
the cathedral clergy prosper greatly, as may be easily seen
by comparing a haggard and unkempt country deacon with
one of the stout, florid, broad-chested deacons of the Kazan
Cathedral. A deacon with a good sounding bass was, until
recently, almost in as great demand in the cities as an opera
singer, and was paid incredible sums for singing the responses
at weddings in wealthy merchants' families.
The parochial priests are called the " white clergy." The
' black clergy " are the monks, and between the two there
is a striking difference. Monasteries have
Monasticism. played an important part in Russian history.
The fierce self-mortification of the monks
of the Kievo-Pechorskaia Lavra, founded in 1062 in Kiev,
deeply impressed the imagination of the Southern Russians
and contributed to the spread of a strongly ascetic form of
Christianity. In the north-eastern forests monasteries were
the chief centres of colonisation. A hermit retired into the
forest to devote himself to prayer and fasting, disciples
gathered around him, and the fame of his miraculous powers
attracted people from the settled region, until gradually a
village or town grew up, the forest was felled and the soil
ii — (2400)
152 Russia of the Russians
brought under cultivation. The new monastery in its turn
sent out colonists farther afield, and so the process continued
indefinitely. Of great importance as a colonising centre was
the great monastery of the Trinity not far from Moscow,
founded in the fourteenth century by St. Sergius Radonezh-
sky. A very large number of monasteries were founded in
and around Novgorod and many of them are still in existence.
At one time the monasteries promoted literature and learn-
ing ; monks translated devotional works from the Greek,
or transcribed Bulgarian translations, copied and illuminated
manuscripts, and wrote historical annals. Then came the
inevitable moral decline. Peter the Great and Catherine
took strong measures against the monasteries and convents
and largely reduced their number, but Alexander I reversed
this policy. During the nineteenth century the Government
at intervals encouraged the development of monasticism,
probably in the hope that it would serve to buttress up the
traditional system.
The monasteries still play an important part in the life of
the Russian Church for two reasons. In the first place, many
of them are objects of popular veneration on account of
their historical associations, or on account of the miracle-
working shrines, the relics of famous saints which they con-
tain. Nearly all the older monasteries were the scenes of
the labours of one of the hundreds of saints in the Russian
calendar, or contain an ikon that, according to legend,
miraculously fell from heaven — as, for instance, the Iberian
Madonna in a monastery on an island in Lake Valdai — or
one that shed tears of blood, or turned back from a town an
invading army, as did the Madonna at Pochaiev in Volhynia
when the Tartar hordes were advancing. In the course of
centuries a body of legend has gathered around these shrines,
endless stories are related about their miracle-working powers,
and the Madonnas of Kazan, Tikhvin, and Pochaiev have a
powerful hold on the popular imagination. And every year
to all these shrines pilgrims come flocking, yielding to that
Church and People 153
impulse to wander, that centuries of roving over the plain
have made a part of the Russian nature. Mile after mile
the pilgrims tramp, men and women, by forest and river, in
rain and sunshine, carrying black bread with them or begging
shelter and food by the way " for Christ's sake." They
gather at the shrine and kiss the relics, and weep and pray,
and feel themselves wrapped and safely guarded in a national
tradition that brings heaven nearer. They exchange news
and impressions, argue about religious matters, develop their
shrewd philosophy and let fall curiously wise sayings.
There are dark sides to the picture. Vagabonds join in
the throng and cheat and delude the unwary. And the con-
duct of the monks in charge of the shrine often has a deprav-
ing effect. Pilgrims come to a monastery on the eve of a
festival, and find the monks sleeping off the effects of a
drinking-bout, while the precincts of the monastery are a
scene of licence. In the morning the monks, dirty and
bloated, come out in procession with ikons and banners and
the pilgrims stupidly follow them into the church where
ieromonachs, or monks in orders, blunder hoarsely through
the mass. In some great monasteries, like the Lavra in Kiev,
the monks systematically exploit the ignorance and simpli-
city of the worshippers. And generally in the monasteries
in or near the cities the idea that monks live a strict, devout,
and noble life seems to be an exploded fiction. The curious
thing is that the people seem to take the laxity of the monks
for granted, and continue to venerate the shrines in spite of
the surrounding demoralisation. Not all monasteries have
been culpable in this respect. Much depends upon the firm-
ness of the abbots or igumeni, among whom there are men
of remarkable administrative capacity, and a considerable
number of monasteries are free from reproach. The con-
vents have a better reputation than the monasteries for
industry and order.
Sometimes in the neighbourhood of a shrine lives a recluse
of lofty character and great spiritual tact, to whom the
154 Russia of the Russians
troubled and anxious come for advice and consolation. Such
recluses, startsy, or elders, as they are called, were formerly
to be met with much more frequently than they are now.
One of the most famous was Amvrosiy (Ambrose) of the
Optyn Monastery near Kaluga, the original of the elder
Zosima in Dostoievsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Often an
element of genuine piety is brought into monasteries by
devout peasants who, after having lived honourably in the
world, take the vows and retire to spend their last days in
quietness and prayer. And for many nervous and harassed
women convents serve as a home of rest. A merchant's
wife will frequently prefer life in a convent to a sanatorium.
As a rule, however, the life of monks and nuns is a dull,
uninspired round of formal duties. The monasteries alto-
gether considering their enormous wealth are amazingly
unproductive. They support, with a few insignificant
exceptions, no charitable institutions, maintain no industries
except the manufacture of candles and ikons and the printing
of ecclesiastical literature, and contribute no money for
national purposes.
But for the Church they exercise a second important func-
tion. They serve as administrative training schools, recruit-
ing grounds for the hierarchy. Bishops, archbishops, and
metropolitans must be celibates, that is to say, they are
members of the " black clergy," live in monasteries, or in
houses that rank as such, and are appointed from among
archimandrites and abbots. Thus the married clergy are
governed by celibates who in their turn occupy prominent
positions in the bureaucracy and are subject to lay authority.
The double function of the monasteries has a curious effect
on the hierarchy. On the one hand, they are guardians of
customs that deeply impress the popular imagination and
awaken religious feeling. On the other hand, they provide
administrators who occupy their place in a strictly co-ordin-
ated bureaucratic system. The result is that the ritual
function of the monasteries is subordinated to administrative
THE METROPOLITAN VLADIMIR OF ST. PETERSBURG
Church and People 155
objects, and the appeal to the popular imagination is
carefully calculated and regulated so that it may further
those political ends that the bureaucracy has in view. The
working of this system was shown in a curious way in Vol-
hynia a few years ago. The Archbishop of Volhynia, Antony,
a very able and energetic man, and Archimandrite Vitaly,
of the Pochaiev Lavra, also a man of restless energy, were
both ardent supporters of the old regime and strongly hostile
to constitutionalism. Amongst the throngs of pilgrims who
came to worship at the shrine of the Madonna, they tried to
promote a violently reactionary popular movement. In a
fanatical young monk called Iliodor (Heliodorus) they found
the agitator they needed for their purpose. Iliodor's fervid
eloquence, his violent attacks on Jews, constitutionalists
and revolutionaries, strangely combined with denunciations
of landlords and capitalists generally, had an electrifying
effect on the crowd. Iliodor's fame spread far and wide,
and he did actually succeed in evoking a strong reactionary
movement among the more ignorant of the South Russian
peasantry.
But the sequel was unexpected. From the Pocha'ev Lavra
Iliodor went to Tsaritsyn on the Volga, where he continued
his denunciations of the enemies of the Tsar and true religion.
Immense crowds gathered around him, for his eloquence
seems to have been inspired by sincerity. His preaching
became more and more democratic in character, he pleaded
the cause of the people not only against the intelligentsia,
journalists, and revolutionaries, not only against landlords
and wealthy tradesmen, but also against officials, governors,
and ministers. And, finally, he began to denounce the Holy
Synod — still in the name of the Tsar. The Synod took
measures against Iliodor, but he was supported by the Bishop
of Saratov, a turbulent ecclesiastic named Hermogen. And
it was with the utmost difficulty that the Synod finally suc-
ceeded in having Iliodor arrested and conveyed to an obscure
monastery, where, after several months of reflection, he
156 Russia of the Russians
finally seceded from the Orthodox Church. His patron,
Bishop Hermogen, was removed from the Saratov see. This
attempt to use the religious fanaticism of the masses as a
means of combating the revolutionary movement ended in
the religious movement assuming a revolutionary character.
So startling and unexpected are the manifestations of mass
psychology in a time of unrest.
The Church authorities were largely concerned in the organi-
sation of the reactionary parties, the union of the Russian
people and others, which by their excesses, their participa-
tion in the anti-Semitic riots and massacres, and their ex-
treme violence of language in the Duma, in their meetings
and in their Press organs, have given the saddest possible
demonstration of the results of using the Church as a political
weapon.
There is in the Russian people a capacity for religious
emotion which the official Church with all its wealth of tra-
dition and complexity of ritual fails wholly
E notionaJh *° sa tisfy> an d which seeks an outlet in all
kinds of irregular ways. Sometimes these
ways are tacitly recognised by the usage of the Church and
do not lead to open conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities^
There are the pilgrimages to the shrines, for instance, with
their halo of romance and adventure. Sometimes in the
towns may be seen a strannik, or wanderer, a man who in
time of sickness, or in sign of repentance for crime has taken
a vow of perpetual pilgrimage from shrine to shrine. Bare-
foot, often bare-headed, with iron-tipped staff in hand, he
tramps year after year from north to south and from east
to west until death comes. Often such men are sternly and
fanatically religious, but often enough they become simply
jolly, careless tramps who love the open road for its own sake
and feel thoroughly at home among professional vagabonds.
Occasionally the strannik preaches or sells tracts or books of
devotion. There are often wanderers who collect money for
the building or restoration of churches. Such a man may
Church and People 157
be a peasant, who, when his wife has died and his sons have
grown to manhood, feels impelled to abandon worldly cares
and to spend his declining years in religious service.
The thirst for something more than is given by the ordinary
routine of church services finds satisfaction again, in the
sermons or counsels of popular preachers, either priests or
laymen. Besides the preaching gift such a preacher may,
like the famous Father John of Kronstadt, have a gift of
healing, and then he attracts an enormous number of fol-
lowers. With such movements the Church authorities have
difficulty in coping because they inevitably tend to assume
an irregular and sectarian character. Father John was a
consistent supporter of the State and the official Church,
but his followers, the so-called Johannites, have simply re-
volted against Church discipline. In all parts of the country
there are brothers to whom the common people constantly
come for guidance and healing. Recently in a remote corner
of Bessarabia, on the frontiers of Roumania, the preaching
of a monk named Innokenty evoked such enthusiasm amongst
the Moldavian peasantry of the region, that the civil authori-
ties in alarm arrested Innokenty and exiled him to a northern
government, whither, in the depth of winter with babes in
arms, devoted adherents followed him. In St. Petersburg
and Moscow there are several " brothers " whose names are
popular among the common people. Occasionally lay
brothers secure an astonishing influence in the higher circles
of society and at Court, and indirectly exercise political
influence.
But religious emotion continually breaks the bounds of
the official Church and finds expression in the sects. Russian
dissent is one of the most interesting manifestations of Rus-
sian popular feeling, and is quite as characteristic as any
political movement. Until April, 1905, when the Tsar issued
his Toleration Edict, the lot of dissenters was a bitter
one. They were subjected to persecution, were regarded as
enemies of public order, their places of worship were closed
158 Russia of the Russians
or carefully watched by the police, frequently their leaders
were imprisoned and exiled, and they themselves transported
in whole communities. All the powerful apparatus of the
State was brought to bear against them. There was a time
when schismatics were burned at the stake, and the sum
total of the dissenters' sufferings represents a very real
martyrdom.
The most important religion outside the State Church is
that of the Raskolniki " Schismatics," " Old Ritualists," or
" Old Believers," who seceded from the
Dissent. official Church in the seventeenth century.
There are no people quite like the Old
Believers in all the world. They seceded from the
powerful official Church and endured cruel persecution, not
for any doctrinal reasons, but because they preferred mis-
prints and mistranslations to correct translations, because
they preferred the older spelling of the name " Jesus," and
because they insisted on making the sign of the cross with
two fingers instead of three. The movement arose owing
to the attempt made by the Patriarch Nikon in the reign of
the Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich to bring the ritual and the
literature of the Russian Church into conformity with the
Greek originals, and to correct errors of translation and
interpretation that had crept in through sheer ignorance.
It was against these perfectly reasonable innovations that
the Old Believers raised vehement protest. They wished to
retain the old forms absolutely intact, and condemned Nikon's
revision as a heresy akin to the Latin heresy, which after the
occupation of Moscow during the Time of Trouble by Roman
Catholic Polish troops the common people regarded with
especial antipathy. In its essence the Old Believers move-
ment was a conservative revolt ; it was as though English
people were to hold indignation meetings and form a separate
Church in defence of the Authorised as against the Revised
Version of the Bible. The leaders of the Old Believers
were persecuted, and the movement rapidly grew through
Church and People 159
persecution. It assumed a democratic character, it became
a protest against arrogant authority, a protest against those
representatives of the State who persecuted " traditional
Christianity," and openly supported heretics, in the long run
a protest against the State itself, involving a belief that the
Tsar was antichrist. The movement was ennobled by suf-
fering, details of ritual unimportant in themselves gathered
far-reaching, heroic associations and became symbols of pro-
found emotions. The old books, the old ikons, the old prayers
and words and forms became the more precious because
worldly powers denied them, and because their retention
involved a continual sacrifice of comfort, ease, and physical
security.
The Old Believers fled to the forests of Eastern and Nor-
thern Russia and founded new settlements where they might
worship in peace. But they were scattered and with diffi-
culty maintained mutual intercourse. The separation from
the official Church raised problems of dogma and practice
which it was not easy to solve. The Old Believers had no
bishops of their own, and the question of the ordination of
priests was one of almost insuperable difficulty. The diffi-
culty was surmounted for a short time by winning over
priests of the Orthodox Church, but this was no permanent
solution. Some decided that no priests were necessary ;
and these became known as the Bezpopovtsy or the popeless
ones. The Bezpopovtsy in their turn split up into a variety
of sects, for the religious emotion aroused by the Old Believers
movement and the peculiar conditions in which they lived
led to endless disputes in theological questions, and to the
constant appearance of new leaders, and the formation of
new sects, or " interpretations " (tolky). The extremists
amongst the Old Believers, the Bieguny or Stranniky were
convinced anarchists, denied the State absolutely, refused
to have any intercourse with the authorities, rejected pass-
ports, and were, in consequence, condemned to a life of
wandering, of constant escape from the police ; hence their
160 Russia of the Russians
name of Bieguny (runners). The Old Believers lived in an
atmosphere of legend, dark superstition was very strong
among them, they retained unmodified old popular beliefs
in evil spirits, and persecution added to their life a peculiar
rigidity and gloom.
But they were men of conscience, lived very strictly, re-
frained from smoking, fasted often, and were extremely
methodical in all their dealings. The consequence was that,
like many other persecuted communities, they, as soon as
the persecution became less severe, began to prosper exceed-
ingly. They built up large businesses, and helped each
other regularly as members of such close communities always
do. A great many of the wealthiest merchants and manu-
facturers in Moscow now are Old Believers, and a prominent
member of the community is M. Guchkov, the leader of
the Octobrists in the Third Duma.
The Popovtsy, that large section of the Old Believers who
recognise the priesthood, were placed in serious difficulty in
the forties of the last century by measures which,
by preventing their winning over priests from the official
Church, threatened them with a complete cessation of the
administration of the sacraments. They averted the danger
by founding a bishopric beyond the frontier at Bielaia
Krinitsa in Galicia, where a small monastery of Old Believers
existed. A Greek bishop named Ambrose was brought from
Constantinople to occupy the see, and by this means the
succession was maintained. Other Old Believer bishoprics
were founded in Roumania and Turkey, and in the course
of time in Central Russia. The system thus established is
called the Hierarchy of Bielaia Krinitsa. The restrictions
imposed on the Old Believers were gradually relaxed during
the course of the last century, but missionaries of the Ortho-
dox Church were very active in combating the schism. The
Toleration Edict of 1905 removed the last impediment, and
an act passed in 1910 finally regulated the position of the
Old Believers. The attitude of the official Church and
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Church and People 161
administrative practice do not, however, readily conform to
the new legislation. At the end of 1912 the whole community
of Old Believers was shocked by an act of bitter intolerance
committed by a police official in the Government of Arch-
angel. On the grave of the priest Avakum, the leader of the
Schism in the seventeenth century, who was burned at the
stake, and who is one of the most remarkable figures in
Russian history, the Old Believers, confident in the measures
guaranteeing liberty of conscience, erected a simple cross.
This cross the police official broke into small fragments, which
he forwarded together with a report to the governor of the
province.
The Old Believers are a particularly interesting community
because they preserve so many distinctive features of the
Russian life of an older time. They have old ikons which
are of great importance for the study of Russian art. Their
mode of speech, their domestic habits, their superstitions
serve as historical and ethnographical documents. With the
spread of education the sterner tenets of the community are
losing their hold upon the younger generation, and there is a
strong tendency to adapt religious practice to modern con-
ditions. With increasing tolerance on the part of the official
Church this would seem to threaten the gradual disappear-
ance of the Old Believers as a distinctive community. But
at present the work of the leaders of the modernising move-
ment, as represented by their organ, Tserkov (The Church),
constitutes an interesting attempt to maintain the continuity
of Orthodox tradition apart from those official influences
which mainly determine the policy of the State Church.
The Old Believers who recognise the priesthood are a
variety of the State Church. Not so the Bezpopovtsy, the
popeless ones. With the Bezpopovtsy begins the passionate
wandering of Russian dissent in search of final truth in fields
forbidden by the law, by convention and by tradition. It
is a strange and desperate adventure, full of dangers, physical
and spiritual, full of the joy of discovery, full of the suffering
162 Russia of the Russians
that is the price of devotion, and of the peace that is its
prize. The company of wanderers finds a home in the forest,
some new interpretation of scripture, some modification of
ritual that seems to solve all doubts and to shine with an
intimate, sheltering light of attainment. They settle and
build. But restless spirits among them are not satisfied and
seek further, testing the resources of prayer, the powers of
the spirit, refusing to conform to the ritual of past inspira-
tions. Again and again the past gains on them and makes
their new revelations, their new ordinances habitual, un-
original, traditional in their turn. Their successors accept
their word blindly, just as the conformists in the world they
had forsaken accepted the word of great teachers of the past
instead of seeking direct inspiration. But each little group
was persecuted. It was not allowed to grow worldly in its
sectarianism, to find in its creed an easy substitute for faith.
The dissenters found joy in suffering, rest in endless wander-
ing, and again and again rejected the tranquillity of attain-
ment to pursue some light of lights beyond ever receding
horizons. What wonder that they often lost the appearance
of common men and seemed possessed by strange powers,
and that again and again their spirits were broken by the
excess of their yearning ? It is the same yearning that is
the distinguishing mark of Russian literature, and the spirit
that impelled the dissenters is very nearly akin to that spirit
that impelled the devotees of popular enlightenment and
political liberty.
Who are all these wanderers, these men and women who
bear strange names, the Pomoriane, Fedoseievtsy and Fili-
povtsy, the Bieguny, Stranniki, Molokane, Dukhobortsy,
Khlysty, Skoptsy, Shtundisty, the New Israel and the non-
prayers, mystics and rationalists, ritualists and protestants,
wrestlers with the Spirit and mortifiers of the flesh ? They
deny each other fiercely, as fiercely as all of them deny the
State Church, and each clings fast to the little lamp or to
the smoking torch that for him lights a way through the
Church and People 163
darkness of this life. But the Bieguny, the Runners, are
the prototype of them all, those Bieguny who have no abid-
ing city for they seek one to come. It is true that even
these inveterate protestants against Church and State have
now largely lost their energy of resistance, that only a few of
them now live up to the full extent of their creed and take
monastic vows and wander in the forests refusing to have
any traffic with the representatives of a State that they con-
sider to be a manifestation of Anti-Christ. Most of them
compromise, and live and do business in the world, sheltering
their more resolute brothers and sisters if need be, and only
going through the formality of an " escape " from the world
on the approach of death. But the spirit of their teaching
is expressed in their hymns and poems, in poems about young
Prince Ioasaf or Iosafat, who left family, wealth, and king-
dom to seek the truth in solitude and prayer — a form of the
Buddha legend which has found its way to the northern
forests — or else in such verses as these : —
" O who will set the fair wilderness before me,
And who will build for me in a still place where no man dwelleth.
That I may not hear the sound of the voice of man,
That I may not see the loveliness of this world,
That I may not behold the vanity of the enchantments of this world,
That I may not desire the glory that comes from man ?
Then would I bitterly weep for the heavy sin that is in me."
The Bieguny have gone to the extreme of denial. They
run ever that they may grasp the prize of their calling. The
other popeless Old Believers who believe that the latter days
have come and grace has departed from the earth are less
vehement in their repudiation of the world. The Pomoriane,
or Dwellers by the Sea — by the White Sea, that is, in the
Governments of Archangel and Olonets — will not eat and
drink with " unbelievers " for fear of defilement, and refuse
to recognise marriages contracted by clergymen of the State
Church. But they include in their services prayers for the
Emperor, for reasons of expediency, it would seem, rather
than of principle. Indeed they are gradually abandoning
164 Russia of the Russians
those bare crags of principle, firm based on which the earliest
teachers of the sect, the monks of the great monastery of
Solovki in the White Sea for seven years in stubborn defence
of the old ritual against Nikon's innovations defied the be-
sieging troops of the Tsar, or that grim principle in the
strength of which so many of the Pomoriane sought victory
over the world in self -martyrdom, committing their bodies
to the flames. The world is putting new questions to which
they cannot easily find an answer. The great cities draw
their members from the villages amidst the northern forests,
they are claimed by the factory that levels all distinctions
of dress and custom, they are compelled to eat and drink
with unbelievers. But if any Pomoriane are so defiled they
cannot join in public worship. Disputes arise, and at last
the workmen assert their right of initiative, organise a com-
munity of their own, and hold services in a shed on the out-
skirts of St. Petersburg. Then there is the difficult question
of marriages. It is better for a man not to marry, declare
the Pomoriane, marriage is only a concession to the flesh.
But if you begin to make concessions you must regulate, and
gradually a large number of Pomoriane have come to recog-
nise marriage as an institution but not as a sacrament. And
now the greatest difficulty of all besets them. They hold
that grace has departed from the earth and that Antichrist
reigns. But the State which they have hitherto regarded
as the embodiment of Antichrist, has ceased to persecute
them, has given them liberty of worship. What then ?
Perhaps grace has not wholly departed, perhaps a true priest-
hood is still to be found on the earth. And the popeless
ones are earnestly debating the question as to whether they
should not reunite with those communities of Old Believers
who recognise the priesthood. Has all their suffering, all
their faith, their teaching been in vain ?
Many groups of the Old Believers are bound by fetters of
tradition, and in fruitless disputes over books and ritual
dissipate their strength. In a village of Old Believers there
Church and People 165
will often be several groups or sects perpetually at war
among themselves ; so poor are they that they are compelled
to have one house of prayer in common, and so bigoted that
each group purifies the house anew after a service has been
held by any of the others. Khlysty, Skoptsy, Dukhobors,
and Molokane are Bezpopovtsy, popeless ones, who have
revolted against the letter of the law and claim, each sect in
its own way, the liberty of the spirit. The Khlysty and
Skoptsy live in a strange world of symbols and ecstasies, of
allegory and new revelation, of antinomianism and of fierce
trampling on the flesh. They tread paths that many mystics
have trodden in their perilous journey in the infinite dark,
mystics of the early Church and of the Middle Ages, mystics
in America and in Persia, in the Protestant world and Moham-
medanism. They are fascinated by the terrible problem of
sin and salvation, they are tossed unrestingly on the sea of
a perpetual conflict between flesh and spirit. Both Khlysty
and Skoptsy seek redemption in the ecstasy of mystical com-
munion, but while the Khlytsy do not restrain the flesh,
often seem to regard concession to the flesh as an element
in ecstasy, the Skoptsy shrink from it in horror ; they are
eunuchs who interpret with terrible literalness the passage
about those who make themselves eunuchs " for the Kingdom
of Heaven's sake." How these sects arose, how peasants in
remote Russian villages evolved these curious systems of
dogma, these ritual dances, this language of symbols it is
not easy to understand. Perhaps human nature tends to
manifest itself in similar forms under similar conditions, and
the teaching of Khlytsy and Skoptsy may simply be a natural
development of the general revolt against ecclesiastical and
political authority which was carried on by the Bezpopovtsy.
But it seems hard to resist the impression of a genealogical
connection with older heresies. The Bogumil or Paulician
heresy made its appearance in Russia soon after the intro-
duction of Christianity, and the close connection between
the early Russian Church and Bulgaria, from whom Russia
166 Russia of the Russians
received the translation of the scriptures and many religious
books, facilitated the penetration of Bogumil influences east-
ward. The Russian Church stamped out the heresy as reso-
lutely as the Roman Catholic Church stamped out in the
West that of the Albigenses, who were also of Bogumil des-
cent. But it probably survived in obscure corners of the
popular mind as a reminiscence, a tendency, and naturally
sprang to life again during the time of religious excitement
aroused by the conflict between the State Church and the
Old Believers. Is there a connection between the religious
dancing of the Khlysty, held with tightly-closed and padded
doors and windows in rooms at the back of St. Petersburg
courtyards or in peasants' cottages on the Volga, and the
services in secluded gardens at the head of the Golden Horn
of those Paulicians whose massacre was ordered by the
Empress Theodora ? Is there a possible connection with
the dancing Dervishes of Pera ? The Paulicians were Mani-
chaeans ; Manicheism was disseminated in Persia and Tur-
kestan, and its influence was felt in the mystical sects of
Islam. And with the perpetual impact of the Mohammedan
East on the growing Russian State strains of Manichaean,
Paulician, dualistic influence could easily find their way
northward. If the influence of Persian art is noticeable on
some of the ikons or sacred pictures of the Moscow period,
it seems natural to trace in popular beliefs signs of Oriental
influence.
But it is far to follow the long routes of belief and custom.
The Khlysty are convinced that they have seen with their
own eyes a heavenly vision, and that to them are continually
vouchsafed new revelations. They have wholly abandoned
Orthodox doctrine. They believe in the pre-existence and
transmigration of souls. ' In the flesh I am sixty-four years
old," said a Khlyst woman on trial, " but my true age, the
years I lived before I came into this world, I know not."
They are dualists, they affirm the existence of a perpetual
warfare between flesh and spirit. But at the same time
Church and People 167
they insist that God is present only in Man, that from the
Creation, He, the Invisible, the Intangible, Unattainable, has
chosen man for his dwelling-place. This is what their oppo-
nents call " the deification of man." Christ, they hold, was
the most perfect embodiment of divinity that the world had
seen until his advent. But many christs have appeared
since then, and the leaders of the Khlysts, the perfect ones
amongst them, are called " christs." Perhaps the name
Khlyst, which seems to refer to the practice of flagellation
may simply be a distortion by outsiders of the name " Christ,"
which is in such frequent use in this sect. And while the
male leaders, various Ivans and Porphirys, are called
" christs," the shrewd, firm-willed women leaders, the Akulinas
and Aksinias, gain the name of bogoroditsy, madonnas, or
' Mothers of God." Church marriages are not recognised,
and if a man will marry he must take to himself a spiritual
wife.
All these " christs " and " madonnas " are surrounded by
a hierarchy of " archangels," " angels," " prophets," and
" saints," members of the communities of the Khlytsy or
Skoptsy. The community of believers is a ship " on the
sea of life, or it may be on some river Don, on which the
' little ships " of individual lives go sailing ; the elder is a
" steersman " or " steerswoman." The ship sails over the
blue sea, but is not drawn into a whirlpool, for the Lord him-
self enters the ship, takes the sail into his hands and sits at
the helm, so that though the seas roar and be troubled the
ship shall not be broken. Or again, the community is a
" garden " or a " vineyard," where cypress trees grow with
" red flowers," " royal flowers," where birds of paradise build
their nests and sing the songs of the cherubim and the sera-
phim. Through the garden flows from Mount Zion a river
of living water with banks of silver and yellow sands. And
on this river again the King's ship goes sailing with warriors
and seamen and Cossacks of the Don who play on the lyre
of David for the marriage of the Captain of Hosts who takes
12 — (2400)
168 Russia of the Russians
as his bride, Golgotha, the Cross. But round the garden is
the dark forest of the world, and the birds who fly beyond
the shelter of the garden are lost in its gloomy depths. In
the midst of their grey, cheerless lives, with one of their
number watching outside the door to give warning if the
police should come, the Khlysty sing of bringing sweet apples
on a golden dish to a high house and begging the lady, the
Empress, the guest and Mother, to accept them. Man}/ of
these symbols the Khlysty and Skoptsy have in common,
for the Skoptsy are an offshoot of the older sect and repre-
sent a reaction against the laxity of the Khlysty at the end
of the eighteenth century.
In ordinary life the Khlysty are hardly to be distinguished
from their neighbours. All their emotion, all their ecstasy
is concentrated in their religious exercises, when gathered
together behind closed doors, they sit dressed in white, and
by reading and singing awaken the slumbering flame. They
strike up a swift, tripping song about the little ships that go
sailing, they grow restless, and first one and then another
steps out into the midst and begins to dance, panting and
jerking the shoulders from side to side, shuffling and whirl-
ing. They dance in pairs, in groups, or all together as a
" ship," following each other in a ring, or as a " wall," again
in a ring, but jumping together in unison. Sometimes they
fall into such a frenzy that they lash themselves with bundles
of twigs. And frenzy is said on occasion to lead to licence,
an accusation, which, though it is repudiated by the Khlysty,
constitutes the chief ground for the severe measures of the
Government against the sect. Khlysty and Skoptsy are
officially classified as the " most dangerous sects."
Perhaps it is a longing for religious ecstasy — the same
longing that accounts for the fervour of camp-meetings and
various forms of revivalism — that explains the comparatively
wide dissemination of the Khlyst teaching in Russia and its
persistence, in spite of persecution on the one hand and the
spread of education on the other. Only a few years ago, in
Church and People 169
1905, during the time of political unrest, a new Khlyst pro-
phet or " christ," arose and, by the proclamation of a new
revelation, the advent of a new era, attracted a large number
of adherents, chiefly among the Kuban Cossacks in the
Northern Caucasus. This prophet, Lubkov, a shop-assistant,
and apparently a man of low intelligence, was able by brib-
ing the officials to hold meetings without let or hindrance.
He travelled from village to village and farm to farm announc-
ing that he was the " christ of the twenty-first century," in
other words, the twenty-first christ after Jesus, and that he
had come to found a New Israel. He ascended a mountain
near Kislovodsk where he professed to have been transfigured,
led his followers to a hot and unfertile " promised land " in
Transcaucasia, on the borders of Persia, and finally went off
to South America where he intended to found a colony for
his adherents.
The Khlysty outwardly conform to the State Church and
expend their energy of protest in religious ecstasy. The
Dukhobors, Molokans, Sttindists, and followers of Sutaiev
seek truth in another direction. They relegate metaphysics
and ritual to a secondary position and emphasise the ethical
aspect of Christianity. Clean living is for them the secret
of salvation, and the ethical code of the Gospel must be the
standard of life. There are mystical elements in the teach-
ing of Dukhobors and Molokans, but they place in the fore-
front faith in Christ interpreted as complete obedience to his
commandments. The " Molokans," men who feed on the
" pure milk of the word," as they explain their own name,
or people who drink milk during Lent as the Orthodox slight-
ingly say, were once simply a variety of Bezpopovtsy, but
their steadily increasing reverence for the Bible as a rule of
faith has brought them to a Protestant position, and they
are now not unlike Baptists. The Dukhobors or Spirit
Wrestlers have suffered imprisonment, stripes, and exile be-
cause of their devotion to the doctrine of non-resistance
which caused them to refuse military service. They are
170 Russia of the Russians
Christian anarchists and communists, and the story of their
martyrdom for the ideals of primitive Christianity troubled
some years ago a world that is not quite sure whether it is
Christian or not, and, if it is, how it is to reconcile with the
Gospel the whole structure of modern civilisation. Universal
brotherhood, peace, love as the supreme law of life, these
are the essential features of the doctrine of the Dukhobors,
just as they are of Quaker teaching, and their firmness in
obeying the inner voice not only brought down on them
Cossack reprisals and material ruin when it led them to re-
fuse military service in Russia, but it baffled even very
liberal-minded Canadian authorities when it led to a refusal
to register title-deeds to the land on which the emigrant
members of the sect settled in 1899.
The Dukhobors were a comparatively small sect, but it is
remarkable how often teaching similar to theirs has made
its appearance quite independently in various parts of Russia.
The same thing occurs repeatedly. A peasant begins to
think for himself about life, reads the Bible, ceases to attend
Church services and revere ikons, professes non-resistance,
and refuses to take oaths or to undergo military service,
becomes, in fact, a Christian anarchist. Why religious
inquiry should so frequently take this form in Russia it is
not easy to say. Perhaps there is obscure diffusion of cer-
tain teachings that it is difficult to trace. Perhaps the anti-
nomian conceptions of the Bezpopovtsy exert an influence
in all sorts of unsuspected directions. There may be traces
of Protestant influence. Or again, it is possible that a cer-
tain anarchist strain in the Russian nature, a reaction against
the excessive pressure of the authority of the Church and
State may account for the spread of non-resistance teachings.
The Stundists, who made their appearance in Southern Russia
after the emancipation of the peasantry, were strongly in-
fluenced by German colonists of the sect of the Nazarenes
who were settled in the Government of Kiev, and German
Mennonites had an influence in other governments. The
Church and People 171
refusal to undergo military service led in all cases to severe
persecution, and persecution naturally inspired in the non-
resisters a burning zeal that infected others. There was a
joy of self-denial in the doctrine, a sense of release from the
fretting claims of the world that made suffering a light thing
to bear. Then, when Leo Tolstoy, whose lifelong spiritual
conflict was so distinctly and titanically Russian, found rest
at last in the simplicity and the doctrine of love and non-
resistance as confessed by Dukhobors and the followers of
the peasant Sutaiev, when he turned his back on the splen-
dours of his own works of art, obeyed the call of the fair
wilderness and set himself to preach his interpretation of
the Gospel in the form of a challenge to the whole of modern
civilisation, it was the fiercely protesting spirit of Russian
dissent that spoke through him, the spirit of the men who
threw themselves into the flames rather than obey a state
that was for them the embodiment of Antichrist, the spirit
of the wanderers in the forests, of the Bieguny and of the
Dukhobors. By what mysterious sub-conscious ways did
the doctrine penetrate Tolstoy's powerful spirit ? He was
strangely sensitive to the breathing of the Russian soil, to
the voices of the forest, to the spirit of vague restless yearn-
ing that the winds bear across the great plain in their wander-
ings from the north and the east and the south. The soul
of the Russian people in which so many influences mingle
and blend and grow, influences that are pagan and Buddhist,
and Manichaean and Christian, and in their unity altogether
Russian, he understood, not by sympathy merely, but by
some subtle community of feeling, as though his soul were
part of a broader folk-consciousness whose waves move un-
restingly within him becoming his private experience, the
distress and the joy of his individual soul. That is why
Tolstoy was so dear to the Russians and why his death so
deeply stirred them, even though the logic of the educated
classes learned in the schools and in European Universities
raised a barrier between him and these. The later Tolstoy
172 Russia of the Russians
and Russian dissent are intimately akin. They are way-
farers and pilgrims in search of a city that is very far
off.
The force of Tolstoy's example naturally strengthened all
the sects of non-resisters during the later years of the nine-
teenth century, and his doctrine had a certain influence upon
the intelligentsia. Instances of refusal to undergo military
service were frequent, but of late years less is heard of such
cases, and the quietists of all kinds seem to have lost ground
heavily during the revolutionary period. Not a few Tol-
stoyans, in the general fever of unrest, became Socialist Revo-
lutionaries. And the forms of dissent that are now making
headway seem to be those that have been imported from
Europe, chiefly several varieties of Baptists known under the
general name of Evangelical Christians. Since the promul-
gation of Toleration laws in 1905 and 1906 the Western
European sects have made considerable progress, although
they are still harassed by administrative impediments and
are unable to secure from government officials anything like
consistent observation of the principles of tolerance. The
missionaries of the State Church combat them in public dis-
pute, as well as by causing the exercise of administrative
pressure. Probably the progress of the Evangelical Chris-
tians may be regarded as one manifestation of that process
of the Europeanisation or perhaps even the Americanisation
of Russia which is now going forward so rapidly. The Rus-
sian tradesman who abandons his kaftan, cuts his hair short,
and wears a collar and tie may, under certain conditions, be
led by religious interest to sing in a Baptist meeting a
translation of " Shall we gather at the river ? '
A certain development of new sects has been noticeable
of late years in the large cities. They arise chiefly within
the State Church as a result of the popularity of certain
preachers or leaders. The Johannites, or followers of Father
John of Kronstadt, are a sect of this kind, and so are the
followers of " brother " Ivan Churikov in St. Petersburg,
Church and People 173
and his Moscow associates, who have gained great influence
among the common people by their denunciations of drunken-
ness and immorality and their appeals for decency. These
movements are hardly sects in the strict sense of the word.
They are as yet in the stage of currents of popular feeling
on which the State Church frowns. But with the growth
of the great modern cities, St. Petersburg and Moscow,
religious movements in Russia are beginning to assume that
nervous, hasty, noisy character which is so characteristic of
religious movements in modern Western cities. Up to the
present the Salvation Army has not been permitted to extend
its operations to Russia, and even if it had been it is probable
that it would have failed because the types of mind to which
the Salvation Army makes appeal hardly existed in Russia.
It is very possible that within a few years such types of
mind will be far more common than now, and then per-
haps religious development in Russia will take new forms
more closely resembling those prevalent in Western Europe.
In the meantime all sorts of new teachers are making their
appearance and gathering little bands of followers. There is
the old man who wanders about the Nizhni Novgorod fair,
for instance, and preaches that believers in his doctrine shall
never die, and that death is simply a sign of want of faith.
There are about thirty " immortals " who have accepted his
teaching, but one of them recently passed away. And then
there is the " Swallow " in St. Petersburg, who teaches that
all the Christian States shall transform the world in 1924,
and that a beginning was made when, in August 1912, the
Archangel Michael solemnly annihilated all evil spirits some-
where in the neighbourhood of New York. It is character-
istic of the new outlook that such a city as " New York "
is mentioned in the sectarian teaching. In the hymns of
the Khlysty and Skoptsy it is St. Petersburg and Moscow
that have a symbolical meaning, and the coming of the Lord
is awaited from the hills of Zion and the mountains of the
Turkish land.
174 Russia of the Russians
The authorities of the State Church make few concessions
to the modern spirit, though after all when bishops and
priests sit even on the Right benches of the
Offi l Duma they are acting in perpetual contra-
diction to that denial of constitutional govern-
ment which is the main theme of their public utterances.
The deadening influence of officialism is felt in all depart-
ments of Church life. The chancelleries of the Holy Synod
and of the consistories which represent the Synod in each
diocese are exactly like the chancelleries of any other govern-
ment department. The affairs of the Church are conducted
by laymen, but not by parishioners in corpore or their repre-
sentatives for whom the affairs of the Church would have a
direct and personal interest, but by officials of the State.
The prelates of the Church are subordinated to these officials :
the principles that prevail in the bureaucracy in general
prevail in the Church, and thus it happens that without
actually wielding temporal authority the Church is at pre-
sent dominated not by spiritual but by political interests,
with sad results. No ecclesiastic of broad-minded or liberal
views is admitted to a leading position in the hierarchy, and
the process of eliminating men of marked individuality and
talent has recently been extended even to the theological
academies, institutions of University rank for the higher
training of the clergy, from which a number of able, dis-
tinguished, and devout professors have recently been com-
pelled to retire in order to give place to men of inferior capa-
city who had ingratiated themselves with the authorities. The
leading organs of the Church, the Tserkovnia Viedomosti, and
the daily newspaper, Kolokol (The Bell), edited by a missionary
named Skvortsov, have a marked reactionary character.
Many devout Orthodox Russians deplore the state of
affairs that now prevails in the State Church, and persistent
efforts are being made to effect reforms. For years the
ablest and most liberal-minded of the clergy have been dis-
cussing the possibility of freeing the Church from its position
Church and People 175
of complete subordination to the State by bringing about
the convocation of a Church Council and the restoration of
the Patriarchate. This question was very eagerly debated
in 1905 before the promulgation of the Constitution, but it
was afterwards obscured by other urgent political issues,
and only vaguely referred to from time to time. Another
question that is frequently discussed in the organs of the
liberal churchmen, the Tserkovno-obshchestvenny Viestnik
(The Ecclesiastical and Social Messenger), published in St.
Petersburg, and the Tserkovnaia Pravda (Church Truth),
published in Berlin, is that of promoting the reform of the
parish with the object of enabling parishioners directly to
participate in the conduct of Church affairs. In the present
transition stage of Russian politics, when the subject of the
relations between State and Church, the Monarch and the
representative institutions is the subject of constant dispute,
it seems hardly probable that any far-reaching reforms will
be effected.
And yet, in spite of the retrograde policy with which the
leaders of the Church have become identified, there are many
indications of a growing interest on the part
Developments of the educated classes in the Church and in
of Religious religious questions generally. The meetings
Thought. of the R e iigi ous an d Philosophical Societies
in St. Petersburg and Moscow, in which are debated impor-
tant questions bearing on the relation between religion and
social life, attract large audiences and are well reported in
the Press. The work of Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900), the
most brilliant of modern Russian philosophers, in whose
eyes philosophy was in the long run the handmaid of theology,
is now making itself more and more widely felt. Vladimir
Soloviev stands before the Russian intelligentsia now as the
most striking example of a man of great learning, a poet, a
bold and consistent liberal publicist who not only possessed
a profound religious faith, but was devoted to the Church
as an institution. Recently his letters and an account of his
Russia of the Russians
: have been published by Professor Radlov. and an exhaus-
analysis of his work by Professor Prince Eugene Trou-
In If ; scow there is a group of ener g . I . c s cholars led
MM. Bulgakov and Berdiaiev who. having ssed through
many varied phases of modern thought, have finally reached a
position similar to that of Soloviev and arc og : hemselves
to the work of elucidating the philosophical bases of orthodoxy.
Religious thought in Russia gives promise, in fact, of very
interesting developments. It is a new conception for the
bulk of the educated classes :hat religion, even if it be not
accepted in some simple may at last be considered and
studied, and not wholly ignored as a creed outworn. It is
. - ~n of the times that one of the most widely-read, serious
books of recent years is William James's Vm g ious
::-:. The intelligentsia is not any more formally
religious than it was, but it has at least relinquished its atti-
tude of uncompromising hostility" to religion and is no longer
rigidly materialistic. The whole trend of thought in this
respect is necessarily very vague, sharply denned dogmas of
all kinds are out of fashion in Russia now, both in politics
and in philosophy. So far one can hardly point to anything
more precise than the removal of an inhibition on religious
::.:: :::_ : r;: :..:- :..:■:.- -. v T ry _:.-: .ir.-.l ;:..: '.''.•:>
up all kinds of curious and fascinating possibilities. The
hostility of the intelligentsia to religion was one of the chief
causes that prevented a real community of feeling between
the educated classes and the masses of the people. But now
that Russian life is growing more modern, more European in
character, the barriers between the intelligentsia and the
people are gradually disappearing. And this is particularly
true in the matter of religion. Not only is the intelligentsia
becoming less pronouncedly anti-religious, but the religious
attitude of the people is changing. Indifference is growing,
and parallel with it a spirit of inquiry, so that while a great
1 The recent rapid spread of such movements as Theosophy seems to
be a symptom of a growing sensitiveness to European tendencies.
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CHAPTER VI
LITERATURE
The early 'eighties of the last century were a critical period
in the history of Russian literature. The great writers who
„, T . had gained distinction in the 'fifties and
The Literature of »_;„+• „ ,
the 'eighties. Slxtles were one b Y one passing away,
Nekrasov, the most popular Russian poet of
his day, died in 1877. Dostoievsky died in 1881, shortly
after having given to the world his great novel, The Brothers
Karamazov. Turgeniev died in 1882. Tolstoy published his
Anna Karenina in 1876-7, and in 1881 experienced the pro-
found religious change which caused him to abandon art and
devote himself to the preaching and practice of the ideals
that gave him peace. The Russian literature that has be-
come famous throughout the world was written before the
'eighties. A great deal of it was contemporary with mid-
Victorian literature, but how different it is from anything
mid- Victorian ! There is no cheerful sense of attainment,
no exultation in achievement. Life for the great Russian
writers is a spiritual adventure on a limitless plain. Nothing
is fixed, stable, and final. The artist concentrates his atten-
tion upon a scene. With wonderful distinctness he notes
contour, colour, and play of character. The scene represents
a definite whole, a unity in itself. It contains the elements
of everyday life, and the Russian artists with a firm hand
place these elements in the foreground and do not evade any
of them. They are realists in the sense that they describe
what they see, conscientiously, because they have the con-
science of great artists. But even when they describe scenes
that are like cameos, set in the framework of fixed habit and
convention, with the details minute and clear in the distant
perspective of reminiscence — as in Turgeniev's beautiful idyll,
178
Literature 179
" First Love," — the picture they give is at once complete
and incomplete. Reality for them is suggestive as music is.
One might say that reality is transparent for them, were it
not that the comparison might obscure the remarkable vivid-
ness of the Russian apprehension of reality. The seen is
suggestive of the half-seen and the unseen. The sight of
things provokes to a wandering onward in search of some-
thing that is just out of reach, that may lie beyond the sun-
set and beyond the night, of a meaning that is perhaps un-
attainable. This is not necessarily mysticism, though with
the gradual failure of artistic power it may lead to such
undisguised mysticism as that of Turgeniev's Klara Milich.
It is not a search for moral perfection, though the strange
restlessness that pervades Tolstoy's novels did express itself
in the author's later life in a fierce assertion of ascetic prin-
ciple. It is not a philosophical inquiry, though the works
of Dostoievsky contain profound philosophy. It is rather a
fearless journey of clear-eyed discovery in the wide realm of
Life — not of human nature only, but of the whole of Life in
its immense variety. There is a refusal, tacit or expressed,
to recognise final limits, or to accept provisional explanations,
an eagerness to apprehend unusual aspects of human nature,
to discover what man actually is in himself, and not merely
what, in his laws and conventions, he says he is. Turgeniev
did not revolt against limitations ; he merely lost sight of
them when, musing in the twilight of autumn evenings, he
gazed from his seat under the lime trees across the boundless
plain of life. For Tolstoy social and historical limitations
were something vexatious, oppressive, something to be over-
come with painful effort in the struggle to win perfect spiritual
liberty. Dostoievsky saw limitations as part of the problem,
that problem of the endless possibilities of sin and goodness
i 1 human nature which perpetually beset him.
The great Russian writers were impelled in their search
not merely by artistic curiosity. And their interest was not
morbid or pathological, though the search led them into
180 Russia of the Russians
strange byways of human nature ; and, though there is a
note of sadness in all their work, from the wistful pensiveness
of Turgeniev to the unsupportable gloom of many situations
in the novels of Dostoievsky ; they were impelled by a deep
moral instinct, by a feeling of wonder and reverence for life.
They were not moralists, they were artists. But to their
artistic perception life was essentially moral, that is to say,
it had a meaning and purpose, though the meaning might
be elusive and hardly to be apprehended, though in its elu-
siveness might lie its attractive power, and though the pur-
suit of it might lead through dark mysteries of negation and
sin. In any case the meaning of life was implicit in life
itself. It was not something to be considered separately
from life. And it is perhaps because of the persistency of
this attitude that the greatest Russian thinkers have not.,
been philosophers pure and simple, but-_novelists. Their
passion lor reality was such that they shrank from schemes
and systems, but pursued the manifold windings of the
problem of life with an artistic intuition that gave a far
truer representation of reality than any dialectical scheme
could possibly have done.
It is not easy to understand precisely why this great
artistic impulse ceased in the early eighties, why Turgeniev,
Tolstoy, and Dostoievsky had no immediate
Causes of successors. For one thing, there was a
Decline. °'
natural exhaustion consequent on intense
literary effort, and it is more than a chance coincidence
that the period of literary decline was also one of political
reaction. Alexander II was assassinated a little more than
a month after the death of Dostoievsky. The years that
followed were years of severe oppression. The stirring life
of the early 'sixties, the time of the Emancipation and the
Great Reforms, was only a memory. The new generation
had grown up in an epoch when the Government's steadily
increasing hostility to reform was confronted by a developing
revolutionary movement, one of the manifestations of which
Literature 181
was the assassination of Alexander II. Attention was diverted
from literature pure and simple to political and social ques-
tions. The critics who had the greatest influence during the
'sixties and 'seventies — and whose influence is to a certain
extent still felt — were Dobroliubov and Pisarev, both of
whom died, at an early age, in the 'sixties. Dobroliubov
appreciated the aesthetic element in literature, but laid great
stress on its political and social value. Pisarev went farther.
He declared war on art which, he asserted, was nothing more
than an attempt on the part of venal and cowardly archi-
tects, decorators, and painters to satisfy the whims of power-
ful capitalists. The society that cultivates the arts while it
has beggars in its midst can only be compared, in Pisarev's
opinion, with the naked savage who decks himself out with
gaudy jewels. The only thing in poetry worth considering
is the useful information it may happen to contain, not its
form or music. That is to say, Pisarev was a Nihilist in
literature, and the natural effect of his teaching was to deaden
the aesthetic sense. The work of the more profound critics,
Bielinski and Dobroliubov, read in the light of Pisarev's
teaching, was interpreted as implying a complete
subordination of literature to social and political ends.
And then there was the effect of the new teaching and
example of Tolstoy, who, after writing Anna Karenina,
acquired in the course of his passionate search for truth the
conviction that art and poetry were a mere illusion. Tolstoy
was not a Nihilist. He did not sympathise with any of the
revolutionary parties. The Positivist theories that were in
vogue among the intelligentsia in the capitals were distaste-
ful to him. The solution he found for the problems that
vexed him was a religious one. But his experience led him
to a denial of art hardly distinguishable in its effects from
the Nihilist position. And the force of his powerful example
enormously strengthened those anti-aesthetic tendencies
which, in the early 'eighties, cast their chilling shadow over
Russian literature.
182 Russia of the Russians
The fundamental explanation of the decline probably lies,
however, in the increasing absorption of the nation's energies
in the political struggle. And yet there were
Some Writers a ^ e men wno even [ n this depressing atmos-
phere made great efforts to produce good
literature. Among the older writers was Nicholas Leskov, a
talented novelist who had gained a wide reputation by his
clerical tales. Leskov revelled in the picturesque vernacular
of the common people and in popular tradition and custom,
and during the latter years of his life — he died in 1895 —
drew his subjects from the rich stores of early Christian legend.
Gleb Uspensky, another prolific writer of fiction, was also
keenly interested in the life of the people. But his interest,
unlike that of Leskov, was predominantly humanitarian.
He was deeply impressed by the sufferings of the peasantry,
and in a long series of tales and sketches he described with
great vigour and penetration the hardships of their lot. Gleb
Uspensky was greatly influenced by the doctrines current
among the intelligentsia of his day, more especially by those
of the so-called Narodniki, or the Agrarian Socialist school,
and the subordination of art to social ends expressed itself
in his case in indifference to form, in a neglect of style. He
frequently wrote simply journalese, the language of the
" thick journals." The political atmosphere of the time had
a melancholy effect on Uspensky' s sensitive mind. He
yielded to drink, and in 1893 he lost his reason.
No less melancholy was the fate of Vsevolod Garshin,
whose work is steeped in the strange lunar light of a genius
hovering on the verge of insanity. Garshin abandoned his
studies in the St. Petersburg Institute of Mines on the out-
break of the Russo-Turkish war in April, 1877, took part with
great distinction in the campaign, was wounded, and wrote
during his convalescence a military story entitled Four Days
which, on its publication, attracted general attention. Gar-
shin continued his studies in St. Petersburg and also engaged
in literary work, but he was subject to strange fits of
Literature 183
melancholy, alternating with sudden bursts of exaltation. Once
he found his way into the presence of Alexander the Second's
famous Minister of the Interior, Count Loris Melikov, and
implored him to win from the Emperor an amnesty for all
offenders. Later he drifted about the streets of Moscow,
consorted with beggars, and was finally picked up by the
police. Brought to the Prefect of the city he besought this
official, with pathetic earnestness, to devote himself to the
service of humanity. He roamed about Russia penniless,
preaching strange doctrines to the peasantry, and finally was
lodged in a lunatic asylum in Orel. On his uncle's estate in
the south of Russia he gradually recovered health, strength,
and peace of mind. The last five years of his life Garshin
spent in St. Petersburg where he secured employment under
the Railway Board, married happily, and in long, quiet even-
ings wrote some of the best of his tales. But every summer
his fits of melancholy returned, and finally, in the spring of
1887, dreading a fresh approach of insanity, he flung himself
in despair down the stairs of the house he lived in and died
of the injuries a few days after. The stories that he wrote
fill only a moderate-sized volume, but they are of rare beauty.
Garshin was an artist who, unlike many of his contemporaries,
profoundly believed in art, and was drawn beyond himself
by a blended ideal of moral and aesthetic beauty. His best
stories, The Red Flower, Nadiezhda Nikolaevna, and Night,
display a strong sense of form combined with a perception
of glimpses of weird beauty caught in half-revealed abysses
of shifting personality. The music of Garshin's work has
the penetrating sadness, the passionate remoteness of ancient
Russian Church music.
Gleb Uspensky and Garshin broke down under the heavy
strain of their time. Michael Saltykov, better known by
his pseudonym of Shchedrin, whose later work was written
in the 'eighties, defended himself with the keen weapon of
satire. In his earlier life Saltykov spent many years in the
Government service, was employed in the Chancellery of the
13— (2400)
184 Russia of the Russians
Governor of Viatka, was an official at the disposition of the
Ministry of the Interior for special missions, and later a
Vice-Governor. In 1886 he retired and devoted himself
entirely to literary work. His thorough knowledge of official
life and ways, and the acquaintance with provincial manners
gained in the course of his service gave him abundant material
for political satire which he made use of in the form of fables,
and allegorical novels and tales. By a dexterous use of
language, often resulting in obscurity, he succeeded in evading
the censor's pencil, and the biting sarcasm of his descriptions
of various political types was a consolation to many during
the oppressive period of reaction. Not a few of his char-
acters and sayings have become proverbial. Some of the
best of Saltykov's works, Messrs. Golovliov, Letters to My
Aunt, and Tales from Poshehonie, were published between
1880 and 1886. Another well-known work, Old Days in
Poshehonie, appeared in 1890, the year after the author's
death. Saltykov's extremely idiomatic style and the obscu-
rity of many of his c llusions have prevented the translation of
his work into foreign languages, and will probably have the
effect of rendering much of his work unintelligible to future
generations of Russians. At present, however, no portrait
is to be more frequently met with in the homes of the Russian
intelligentsia than that of Shchedrin — a massive head with
long, straggling beard, deeply wrinkled forehead, and big,
round eyes, shrewd and sad.
It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast to Saltykov
than Vladimir Korolenko, whose Dream of Makar, a story of
Eastern Siberia, aroused delighted surprise on its publication
in 1885, and who has since then continued to occupy a dis-
tinguished place among the writers of Russian fiction. Koro-
lenko, who is of Southern Russian origin, was exiled before
he was thirty to the Yakut Region in Eastern Siberia, but
was later allowed to settle in Nizhni Novgorod. For the last
twenty years he has been editor of the magazine -Russkoie
Bogatstvo (Russian Wealth). There is no shadow of bitterness
Literature 185
in Korolenko's work. He is constantly compassionate,
and while steadily opposing all forms of wrong, eagerly seeks
the goodness in things evil. He is gentle, wistful, sensitive
to natural beauty, and, above all things, full of pity for man.
In his workmanship Korolenko is scrupulously careful ; his
published stories are contained in three small volumes, while
those in manuscript, which he steadfastly refrains from pub-
lishing, would probably fill three times the number. They
deal with the lives of humble folk in Eastern Siberia, the
Volga region and Southern Russia, and are pervaded by a
real and attractive humanitarian feeling, but they do not
even suggest the depths reached by the great masters of
Russian prose. The sincere respect Korolenko enjoys and
the influence he wields are due rather to the engaging per-
sonality displayed in his writings than to their artistic merit.
He has been well called " an artist as publicist, and a publicist
as artist."
Anton Chehov made his appearance in the 'eighties, when
literature was sinking low. But the name of Chehov is in
itself a denial of decline. He lifted decline
Anton Chehov. on to the plane of art. He divested dullness
of its banality. He discovered in a colour-
less, formless monotony of existence undertones of vibrating
humanity. He lived in a period of extreme depression, but
he did not even declare war on it. He did not assume any
predetermined attitude to life. He took life as he, with his
fine artistic perception, found it. There is a Russian word,
skuka, which means boredom, and very much more than
boredom — a sense of emptiness and insipidity of life leading
to nerveless inactivity that may just stop short of being
tragical, and recoils the more heavily upon itself because it
fails to reach the poignancy of a tragical solution. This
gloomily pervasive element in the Russian life of his time
Chehov depicted with a masterly hand. He does not spare
his readers, nor does he spare himself or reality. He does
not set himself great problems, he rather shrinks from them.
186 Russia of the Russians
He sees life piecemeal with the eyes of a sceptic, and it is
characteristic of his temper that he wrote not novels, but
short stories and tales. The first weapon with which he
approached reality was humour, and his earlier stories were
light, amusing sketches, published in comic journals. He
never lost his humour, but it developed into a faculty of
keen, dispassionate analysis, while with the years his prac-
tical common sense grew into large-hearted wisdom. The
doctrinaire attitude he detested ; he held aloof from the
schools and disputes of the intelligentsia, and had a rooted
dislike for the " thick journals." Chehov is like Maupassant
in some respects, but there is a glitter in Maupassant's work
that is absent from that of the Russian writer. Chehov charms
by a sobriety of demeanour that lights up into subtle humour
or suggests far extending wastes of hopelessness, but never
permits of the blurring of a single outline. There are many
who can describe life in Southern lands with their obvious
picturesqueness and warmth of colour. It requires extra-
ordinary skill to describe as Chehov has done the dreary
vacuity of the Russian North in time of reaction.
Chehov was the son of a peasant turned shopkeeper, and
was by profession a doctor. These circumstances perhaps
partially explain his aversion from theory. He was a con-
stant observer, and has described in his stories a whole world
of the Russian characters of his time — cattle-drivers, railway
guards, country gentlemen, waiters, innkeepers, professors,
students, doctors, especially Zemstvo doctors, nurses, soldiers,
merchants, Government officials, various types of the intelli-
gentsia, women of all kinds, silly and clever, housemaids and
fashionable women, professional women, peasant women,
prostitutes, cab-drivers, bath-keepers, broken men, madmen,
brutal men, noble men, vulgar men — there is no end to the
long procession that passes on and on under grey skies —
whither and to what purpose, Chehov does not choose to
know. The hopelessness of the time is in his stories, the
wistful longings and the willessness and powerlessness of the
ANTON CHEHOV
Literature 187
educated class, the superficial culture of the towns with its
frequent lapses into vulgarity, and the ironical smile of a
depressing yet elusive reality.
After all for Chehov reality is elusive. For all the clear-
ness and steadiness of his gaze prosaic reality becomes as he
looks upon it enigmatic and symbolical, the sober, restrained
march of his prose breaks into poetry, the sceptic's emotional
apprehension of life becomes mystical. Chehov's characters
are often sentimental, Chehov himself never is, but he is
sometimes mystical, because the very faithfulness of his
record of life brings him into touch with elemental forces.
At times it is as though these elemental forces themselves
enter into his exposition and form the images which suggest
their mysterious working. And this in natural perspective,
without any blurring of the mercilessly clear outline of the
story. The Black Monk, for instance,- — an English trans-
lation of which has been published by Mr. R. E. C. Long —
the story of a scholar who was haunted by a black monk,
and finally died of a sharp attack of the mental and physical
disease of which these apparitions were the symptom, is not
merely a clever account of an interesting pathological case.
The very reticence of the narrative excludes a purely physical
explanation of the story which rather resembles Garshin's
stories in its suggestion of strange forces at play on the fringe
of personality. To take an instance of a different kind,
Chehov has a short and very vivid account of a young and
vigorous station-master who lives on a lonely wayside station
in the Southern Steppe with a wife whom he does not
love. A coquette, a relative of his wife's, appears, and a
hurricane of elemental passion sweeps the station-master
off his feet and devastates his life. The story is told
directly, simply, without comment, without explanation, as
a fact, like a storm at sea. But it awakens something of the
awe that is aroused by the operation of powerful natural
forces.
It is frequently asserted that Chehov is a pessimist. He
188 Russia of the Russians
is nothing so downright as that. From a theoretical point
of view he is inconclusive. He records, leaves facts to speak
for themselves, and leaves questions perpetually open. But
his fundamental attitude is one of reverence for the bare
fact of life, for the strange, vast play of forces in which man
with his feeble will and blundering reason is pitilessly in-
volved. The keenness of his artistic interest in the sorry
adventures of weak human beings on their way through life
had its origin in a warm sympathy for man as man. And
perhaps that wistful longing for a " brighter future " which
is so often expressed by Chehov's characters is the echo of a
feeling that deeply stirred his own heart.
There has been a great deal of discussion about Chehov's
plays, and the question as to their real value and importance
is not settled yet. These plays, the titles of which are Ivanov,
The Three Sisters, Uncle Vania, The Seagull, and The Cherry
Garden, form a distinctive type which has found a few feeble
imitators, but does not seem destined to hold its ground
permanently for the simple reason that it reflects a now
almost forgotten mood of an epoch that is past. It is in
connection with the theatre that Chehov's plays should be
discussed, because it was in their production that the Artistic
Theatre in Moscow first gave expression to its original con-
ceptions of the drama and won its reputation. What Chehov's
plays are as produced by the Moscow Theatre is one thing, what
they are as literature is quite another. And as literature it
must be admitted that they are disappointing. Chehov's
characteristic lowness of tone, his careful avoidance of the
unusual, his inconclusiveness, his habit of ending with an
interrogation note do not harmonise with the dramatic form.
The drama demands the contrast of light and shade, that
heightening of tone, and that element of illusion which
Chehov, in his scepticism, deliberately tried to avoid. There
is a certain mild beauty in the plays as of the sighing of leaves
in a lime-tree avenue in autumn, but how much more obvi-
ously is the author's talent at home in the tales. Of quite
Literature 189
a different character are Chehov's jolly little one act comedies
like The Wedding and The Bear, which never fail to arouse
roars of laughter whether the performers are peasants or
artists.
Chehov spent the later years of his life at his villa in the
Crimea and in travelling abroad in the hope of restoring his
enfeebled health. He died at Badenweiler in the Black
Forest in 1904, just before the close of the epoch which found
in him its most___talented interpreter. During his lifetime
the critics long refused to recognise him. He was too inde-
pendent. He insisted on looking at life with his own eyes
and not through the spectacles of any school. And the
critics declared that he had no ideals, that he was callous
to suffering, that it was a matter of indifference to him
whether he described a bird or an execution, that his writings
had no clearly marked moral tendency. Chehov went his
own way in spite of the critics. The public recognised him,
and in the end it was the warmth of public recognition that
compelled the critics to take his work more seriously into
account.
Who is the greater, Chehov or Gorky ? This question was
at one time hotly debated. It has lost interest now, for the
answer in Chehov's favour is simple and clear. But when
Maxim Gorky's first stories appeared in 1895 and 1896 they
were enthusiastically acclaimed alike by the public and the
critics. He rose to fame in a day. The brilliance of his
reputation obscured that of all his contemporaries. His books
had a success unprecedented in Russia. Twenty-five thou-
sand copies of his play Townsfolk were sold in fifteen days
after its publication in 1900. Gorky was feted everywhere,
welcomed at railway stations by cheering crowds, besieged
in the green rooms of theatres by mobs of ecstatic students.
His success resembled that of an opera singer rather than
that of a writer. After the death of the poet Nekrasov in
1877 it had been the custom to honour distinguished authors
by attending their funerals en masse and listening to speeches
190 Russia of the Russians
over their graves. But no writer had ever been honoured
during his lifetime as was this young expert in the psychology
of the tramp.
Gorky was a picturesque figure and had had an adven-
turous career. He was born in Nizhni Novgorod in 1869,
his real name being Alexander Maksimovich
Maxim Gorky. Peshkov. His father had charge of a
steamship office and his grandfather, with
whom he lived after his father's death, was a dyer. When
Gorky was seven penury overtook the old dyer,
and the boy was thrust into the career of a jack-of-all-trades.
He worked in a boot shop, was apprenticed to a draughts-
man — from whom he ran away- — was cook's boy on a Volga
steamer, a baker's assistant in Kazan, and a fruit hawker in
Nizhni Novgorod. In the course of his wanderings he fell
into the company of tramps, vagabonds, and all kinds of odd
characters who afterwards served as material for his stories.
The cook he worked for on the Volga steamer was an ardent
reader, and stimulated by his example, Gorky devoured
chap-books of the Dick Turpin type. Later in Kazan he
associated with University students and read the Russian
classics. At the age of twenty he became a lawyer's clerk
in Nizhni Novgorod and made many friends among the edu-
cated people of the town. But again the wandering spirit
came upon him. He drifted to the south of Russia, worked
as a lumper in Odessa, and as a fisherman on the Caspian,
suffering great hardships but enjoying a wild, irresponsible
liberty. While employed in the railway workshops in Tiflis
in 1892 Gorky printed his first story in a local newspaper.
Other stories of his were printed in newspapers in Kazan and
Nizhni Novgorod, and in 1894 his work attracted the atten-
tion of Korolenko, who was then living in the latter town.
Gorky's acquaintance with Korolenko opened his way into
a broader literary world. From 1895 onwards he published
his stories in the " thick journals," where their success was
immediately assured. The tales of the " son of the people,"
Literature 191
as Gorky was called, described aspects of life that had until
then been barely touched on in Russian literature. They
gave vivid pictures of the lot of roving, restless vagabonds
with no occupation in particular, with no home but the night-
shelter or a boat upturned on the shore, of men and women
who were regarded as the outcasts of society. And this life
was described with such zest and vigour, with such a wealth
of colour, and such an infectious contempt for property and
dull comfort and a delight in roving for its own sake that
it is not surprising that the public imagination was suddenly
touched and charmed. The popularity of Gorky's tales was
enhanced by the fact that the author himself had risen from
the depths ; his reputation gained from the prevailing Socialist
temper an added lustre. It was because he was a self-made
man of the people that Gorky so quickly succeeded in winning
the approval of that school of criticism which first and
foremost sought social tendencies in literature.
Those early stories of Gorky's in which he set down his
impressions of vagabond life, such as Malva, Chelkash, and
They who were once Men, were fresh and spirited, and dis-
played real talent. They contained vivid descriptions of
nature, the characters lived and breathed, and there was a
piquant flavour of tramp philosophy. The standpoint was
novel and the grasp direct. It would be interesting to specu-
late what might have happened to Gorky if he had been able
to cultivate his artistic powers while retaining his individuality
intact. But fame came too suddenly for him, a fame that
was largely due to circumstances that had nothing to do
with his literary merits. And the real Gorky was swept
away in the current of his own clamorous reputation. Raw,
uneducated, inexperienced as he was in the ways of the
literary world, he was drawn into the endless disputes of the
intelligentsia. He tried to see himself as the critics saw him,
and to put into his later work the tendencies that critics
imagined they perceived in his early stories. He identified
himself with Marxian Socialists. But his association with
192 Russia of the Russians
the intelligentsia robbed him of his native power, while, un-
fortunately for Gorky, those literary circles in which he
moved were more interested in social theories than in art,
and were unable to show him how to cultivate the talent he
actually possessed. Gorky continued to write, drawing
freely on his store of picturesque reminiscences. But he
wrote at random with a liberal use of bright colours and with
little care in selection. His style lost its nervous vigour and
directness, and slipshod paraphrase frequently took the place
of imagery. He made two attempts in Foma Gordieiev and
A Trio to write larger tales or novels, but with only moderate
success. A Trio — a novel full of reminiscences of the
author's boyhood in Nizhni Novgorod — bored him, and he
found difficulty in finishing it. For a time his talent
recovered energy in the drama. Two plays, The Townsfolk
(1901) and In the Abyss (1902), had a well-deserved suc-
cess in Russia, and the latter, which describes life in a
night-shelter, was extraordinarily successful on the German
stage.
After the publication of In the Abyss Gorky's power
steadily declined. He wrote other plays, but they attracted
comparatively little attention. His personality, however,
was constantly in the forefront of public interest. In 1902
he was elected member of the Section of Belles Lettres in the
Academy of Science, but the police insisted on his returning
the diploma on the ground that he was politically unsound.
Chehov and Korolenko, indignant at the treatment of their
colleague, immediately resigned their membership of the
Academy. At the beginning of 1905 Gorky was arrested,
together with other writers whom the police, alarmed by the
labour movement, wrongly suspected of having formed a
Secret Provisional Government. The arrest aroused great
indignation abroad and meetings of protest were held in
nearly every country in Europe. After the promulgation of
the Constitution in October Gorky took a prominent part
in a Social Democratic paper called the Novaia Zhizn. Later
i
MAXIM GORKY
Literature 193
he went abroad and, prevented by the reaction from returning
to Russia, he settled on the island of Capri, near Naples, where
he now resides.
Gorky continues to write, and his stories are published
from time to time in Russia. One of them, Confession, the
story of a youth who wandered over Russia with orthodox
pilgrims in search of God and thought he had found what
he sought in an idealised conception of the people seemed
to promise a revival of Gorky's former power, but the promise
has not been fulfilled.
There is something tragical in the lot of this strange and
original writer. He is a man of the people, and he is caught
in the meshes of the theories of the schools. A Russian
through and through, who draws all his mental and spiritual
nutriment from the Russian soil, he is compelled to live in
exile in Western Europe whose complex civilisation oppresses
him. He revolts against his position. He feels himself
bound hand and foot. The elemental instincts of his nature
find expression in bitter reproaches directed against the
intelligentsia, in savage attacks on the bourgeoise of Western
Europe. He chafes and rebels, helplessly. After attaining
fame and wealth with unprecedented suddenness he endures
in his distant island home the humiliation of reading articles
by Russian critics on " The End of Gorky." " Gorky, the
Bitter One," he signed his stories, because of the hardships
of his boyhood and youth, because of the world's contemptu-
ous indifference to his sufferings. And in middle age a
deeper bitterness — the bitterness of the contemptuous rejection
of a world that had toyed with him — has fallen heavily upon
him.
Perhaps Gorky's work is done. And yet there is some-
thing in his personality so disquieting, such a tantalising
suggestion of unused talent struggling to free itself from
artificial impediments that it would be rash to deny the
possibility of fresh and surprising developments in his literary
career,
194 Russia of the Russians
Gorky was " discovered " by Korolenko, and he in turn
discovered in Moscow in 1897 a new writer in the person of
a briefless young lawyer named Leonid
Andreiev. Andreiev, who has since attained a popu-
larity rivalling Gorky's own. Andreiev is one
of the most puzzling of modern Russian writers, the true
child of a troubled time. His work has very great and very
obvious defects that again and again threaten wholly to
obscure the talent that this disappointing writer undoubtedly
possesses. It is unfortunate for Andreiev that his now wan-
ing popularity was due largely to the least characteristic, the
inessential and the defective aspects of his work, to his ten-
dency to rhetorical exaggeration and to a pessimism which
was largely, though not wholly, a pose. Andreiev chose to
make himself the apostle of unrelieved gloom, and at a time
when in many the fire of life was burning low and over con-
sciousness shadows were hanging heavily there was a dis-
position to take him at his word. Numbers of people re-
garded him as a master, and lectures on the philosophy of
his writings attracted large audiences. As a matter of fact,
this philosophy is neither complex nor profound, but it satis-
fied for a time the thirst for broad generalisation and sum-
mary interpretations of the meaning of life that is still a
characteristic feature of the Russian public.
Andreiev's early stories were well written, but there was little
to distinguish them from many other short stories of the
period except a certain hardness of outline and an unusual
insistence on despair. In the Life of Vastly Fiveisky (1904),
the story of the attempt of a half-insane village priest to
raise a dead man, the tendencies that are most characteristic
of Andreiev's later work were sharply defined. He concen-
trated his attention on the element of the horrible that is
inseparable from crime, insanity, and moral breakdown.
And it is because Andreiev isolates the horrible and uses it
too obviously for the purposes of literary effect that, as a
stylist, he so frequently misses his footing. From 1904
Literature 195
onward his style was adapted to a pose. His lines are hard
and jagged. He seems of set purpose to abstain from gently
flowing outline. The sunlight he describes has a metallic
and not a vital gleam. His characters — in the dramas and
most of the later tales — do not move ; they are moved with
a deliberate, measured movement suggestive of a mechanical
contrivance.
A sketch called Red Laughter, written in 1905, during
the Manchurian struggle and describing the horrors of war,
is very characteristic of Andreiev's manner. The opening
words, " Madness and horror ! " are the burden of the tale,
but the horror is stated insistently in so many words, the
perception of it is conveyed not by tortuous plot or insidious
suggestion, but by downright epithets and obvious imagery.
The result was aptly described by Tolstoy : " Andreiev says
' Bo ! ' but he leaves me cold."
In some stories of the revolutionary period told with
simplicity and directness, such as The Governor and the
Seven Men Hanged, Andreiev displays a distinct power of
grim, restrained narrative. The play, The Life of Man, pro-
duced by the Komisarzhevskaia Theatre in St. Petersburg
and the Artistic Theatre in Moscow, aroused great interest
in Russia and has been much discussed abroad. It is the
bare outline of what Andreiev regards as the life of a typical
man stripped of all accidentals. A prologue is declaimed
by a " Someone in grey named He " ; then in successive scenes
are depicted the birth of the man, his love, his worldly suc-
cess, his failure and his death. Life is represented as the
mere burning down of a candle to extinction, a passage from
nothingness to nothingness across a lighted stage over which
inscrutable and unfriendly powers are watching. Love is an
illusion, success is an illusion, life has no meaning. Andreiev's
hard lines, his stiff, measured movement serve well here to
enhance the designed geometrical effect. The rhetoric habit-
ual to him is not out of place in scenes deliberately abstracted
on account of their supposed typical character from the
196 Russia of the Russians
complex processes of life. The play has the impressiveness of
a definite mood of generalisation presented in sharp outline.
The defects are a shallowness of conception and a too facile
and complacent pessimism.
Since 1905 Andreiev has been extraordinarily productive,
Not a year passes without the appearance of tales or plays
from his pen, and until about 1912 every new work of his was
eagerly bought and read by an army of admirers. Some of
the plays, like Savva and King Hunger, contain echoes of the
labour movement and the revolution. In Anathema, an
attempt at philosophical tragedy with a Satan, representing
the reasoning faculty in man as the central figure, the author's
lack of intellectual discipline and his weakness for rhetoric
lead to a result that can only be described as a pretentious
failure. Black Masks in which the associates of the hero, a
hypothetical mediaeval duke, became transformed into a
throng of black masks representing his own evil deeds, while
in the final scene the black masks themselves are trans-
formed into a pouring, engulfing darkness of absolute night, is
too full of calculated and exaggerated horror to be impressive
or convincing. Anphisa, which enjoys some success on the
stage, is a sordid study of provincial manners, and The Days
of our Life is an overdrawn picture of the life of University
students. The latest of Andreiev's plays, Ekaterina Ivanovna,
though very defective in construction, is based on an interest-
ing idea, that of a young, beautiful, and sensitive woman
losing her moral balance and sinking into depravity because
her husband's unwarranted charge of infidelity " killed her
soul," although the revolver shots he fired at her in his anger
failed even to wound her body. One of the most characteristic
of the tales published by Andreiev in recent years is Eleazar,
describing the life of Lazarus after his resurrection. The
Russian author, far from observing the reticence which
Browning observed in dealing with the same subject, em-
ploys with depressing results his favourite instrument of
rhetoric in order to heighten an effect of horror. Lazarus
Literature 197
is represented as a gruesome shape whose look, full of the
dreadful vision of infinite nothingness seen in the tomb,
paralyses vital energy in all upon whom it falls. But the
impression intended to be conveyed is marred, is in fact
almost wholly obscured, as in a great deal of Andreiev's
work, by irreparable failures of tact and breaches of
proportion.
Andreiev is a perplexing writer. His indulgence in cheap
and vulgar effect seems at times to suggest the entire absence
of an aesthetic conscience. He lacks humour, and for want
of true musical sensitiveness his style drops into bathos at
critical moments. Too often he sets himself tasks that are
manifestly far beyond his powers. There are times when he
may be said to serve as a cinematograph to Dostoievsky,
that is to say, problems that caused Dostoievsky acute
spiritual suffering are taken up by Andreiev for the pur-
poses of superficial, pictorial effect. And yet Andreiev's
frequent gleams of talent suggest that if he would realise
his own limitations and shake off the deleterious effects of
his own inflated popularity he might yet produce work of
permanent value.
Contemporary Russian literature is divided into two main
schools, that of the so-called " modernists " or symbolists,
and that of the " realists." Andreiev, for all his toying with
symbolism, must be classed together with Gorky and his
associates among the realists. Another realist who deserves
mention at this point is Alexander Kuprin. Kuprin is a
retired officer, and his most successful stories, several of which
have been translated into English, deal with army life. He
is a born story-teller with a power of vivid description and
virile, rapid narration that is displayed at its best in his early
work. Sometimes he relapses into declamation on social
questions, sometimes he is sentimental, but generally his
humour and his own keen interest in the story carry him
safely through. The best known of his works is The Duel,
a longish tale depicting the cheerless life of the average officer
198 Russia of the Russians
in a remote provincial town. Staff Captain Rubinkov, a
story of a Japanese spy, is, as a sheer rattling story, one of
the best that has been written in Russia during recent years.
Unfortunately Kuprin has almost ceased to write, and when
he does write he shows only faint gleams of his old power.
At the present moment the realists are obscured by the
modernists. The modernist movement — the name like " deca-
dent " and " symbolist," which are also fre-
Th M Mo " lst quently used, is largely a conventional desig-
nation — had its origin in a protest made by
a few writers in the early 'nineties against a subordination of
art to political ends. These writers, the poets Balmont and
Briusov, and the critic Merezhkovsky, insisted that art was
concerned first and foremost with beauty, not with morality,
and that its true function was to appeal directly to the imag-
ination and not to inculcate moral ideas. Some writers of
the group, Briusov, for instance, were strongly influenced by
the French symbolists, Verlaine and Mallarme, and French
influence has made itself constantly felt in the movement
down to the present moment. The modernists urged the
great importance of form, refused to admit that the resources
of form had been exhausted in Russian literature and under-
took experiments in style. Their rejection of the prevailing
view that literature was a form of social service was accom-
panied by an emphatic assertion of individualism. Art must
not be sacrificed to morality or politics, urge the modernists,
neither must the individual be sacrificed to society. In the
assertion of individualism the influence of Nietzsche played
an important part.
The ruling school of critics, Mikhailovsky and his associ-
ates, derided the new movement, made much of its excesses
and wholly ignored its real merits. A monthly called the
Sievemy Viestnik (Northern Messenger), edited by Madame
Gurevich, which acted as the organ of the modernist move-
ment, was compelled to cease publication at the end of its
second year (in 1897), " for lack of subscribers," as its
Literature 199
opponents complacently observed. The Sieverny Viestnik did
good service in making its readers acquainted with literary
tendencies in Western Europe and in weakening that attitude
of dogmatic conservatism on literary questions which had
proved such an impediment to development and had pre-
vented the adequate recognition of the one great outstanding
writer of the period, Chehov. Merezhkovsky's critical studies
of classical, Western European, and Russian writers, attracted
adherents to the new school, and from the beginning of the
present century onward the movement has steadily developed.
It could not but develop. It represented an attempt to re-
gain intellectual touch with Europe, to reassert the intrinsic
value of literature and art. It drew attention afresh to the
treasures of Russian literature. It pointed out the great-
ness of Dostoievsky which had at the best been grudgingly
admitted by the critics of the 'eighties and the 'nineties.
There was inevitable exaggeration and over-emphasis.
There were oddities which were eagerly seized on by hostile
critics. The modernists had no fixed body of doctrine.
Several different currents of thought connected only by a
common antipathy to the " realist " attitude were included
in a general condemnation of " decadence." The poets,
Briusov and Balmont were eagerly experimenting in new forms
of poetical beauty. Merezhkovsky was interested in philo-
sophical questions, and asserted what was considered rank
heresy by the realists, that highly-educated and progressive
men might sincerely believe in God and even find elements
of profound truth in the Orthodox Church. Rozanov paid
special attention to sexual problems and questions connected
with family life and the training of children. Diagilev and
Filosofov were interested mainly in questions of art. But
all were agreed on one point, that literature and art had a
value of their own, independently of questions as to forms
of Government, the relations between capital and labour and
the ownership of land.
The new movement expressed itself in various ways. A
14— (2400)
200 Russia of the Russians
Religious Philosophical Society, founded in St. Petersburg
mainly through the instrumentality of Merezhkovsky, served
as a centre for debates on the philosophy of history, on
ecclesiastical politics, and on the doctrinal problems of the
Orthodox Church. The society directly continued the work
of the philosopher, poet, theologian, and publicist, Vladimir
Solo vie v, who died in the year of its foundation. The artists
connected with the modernist movement founded in 1899 a
monthly called Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art), which
gave reproductions of pictures of the latest French and
Russian schools, critical articles advocating new, and for
Russia, startling views on art, and prose and verse by the
best of the modernist writers. In 1903 Madame Merezh-
kovsky founded a literary and philosophical monthly called
Novy Put (the New Way). The venture was not wholly suc-
cessful, and towards the close of 1904, when politics assumed
a new and very actual interest, greater prominence was given
to the economical and political section ; the monthly was
renamed Voprosy Zhizni (Questions of Life), and in its new
form subsisted until the end of 1905. In Moscow Briusov
founded a much smaller review called Viesy (Scales), devoted
solely to art, poetry, belles-lettres, and criticism. This review,
which was conducted by Briusov with great ability and acu-
men, was for the seven years of its existence the centre of the
modernist movement in Moscow. In 1906 a new St. Peters-
burg group was formed with the poet and critic Viacheslav
Ivanov as its centre. The upheaval of ideas caused by the
revolutionary movement of 1905 made an irreconcilably
hostile attitude to the modernist movement largely obsolete.
Balmont's poems suddenly became popular among the stu-
dents, and " decadents," symbolists," and " modernists "
came to be regarded as curiously odd and tantalising but
undoubtedly very interesting people. Modernist influences
gained in strength, realists went over to the modernist camp,
the movement lost its strangeness, many of its watchwords
were generally accepted in the mood of wild eclecticism that
Literature 201
marked the years immediately following on the revolution ;
it has suffered the drawbacks of being fashionable, it has been
caricatured and vulgarised. At the same time the turmoil
of the revolution affected the modernists, aroused their
interest in social and political conflicts, brought them into
touch with mass movements and gave their teaching a social
and political colouring. Briusov, Balmont, and Viacheslav
Ivanov wrote poems on the war, the revolution, and the
Constitution. In a poem called " The Coming Huns " Briusov
welcomed in the spirit of a true decadent the onrush of wild
elements destructive of culture. Viacheslav Ivanov developed
theories concerning the people as the creator of artistic values
and of myth-creation as an essential element in literature.
Some modernists became philosophical socialists. Others
became philosophical or " mystical " anarchists. Merezh-
kovsky, who was absent from Russia during the revolutionary
period, discussed on his return the religious element in the
revolution. The Religious Philosophical Society, which in
1908 resumed its sittings after a long interruption, welcomed
into its midst social democratic philosophers and debated
the question, partly suggested by Gorky's Confession, as to
whether the people might in any sense be regarded as a
possible object of devotion. Rozanov for a time observed
with keen interest the play of popular forces in the political
movement, and during the session of the First Duma he wan-
dered about the Taurida Palace almost daily, noting all kinds
of curious manifestations of human instinct. It was a time
of exhilaration, when thought was free, when new ideas had
an effect of inspiration, words had a magic power, hazy out-
lines of systems seemed complete philosophies, tradition and
convention shadowy and wholly negligible illusions. Every-
thing seemed possible. Human personality seemed illimitable
and invincible. ; ' Let us shake old Chaos, Let us tear down
the firm-clamped heaven : for we can, we can, we can,"
cried a young poet, Sergius Gorodetsky, in Viacheslav Ivanov's
rooms in a tower overlooking the Taurida Palace.
202 Russia of the Russians
• Everyone was a little mad in those days, and in the general
madness modernists ceased to appear odd and abnormal.
Such startling things were happening that realists lost their
bearings and forgot their doctrines. The modernists treated
sexual questions with freedom, and had been condemned by
the realist school for doing so. When the reaction set in
after the revolutionary movement a wave of excited interest
in sexual questions passed over the country affecting chiefly
students and schoolboys and schoolgirls, with disastrous
consequences to many. The immediate occasion of this
extraordinary manifestation of mass psychology is probably
to be found in the nervous reaction consequent on the ex-
treme tension of the political movement in 1905 and the be-
ginning of 1906. It was reflected in literature, many modern-
ists and many realists surrendered to its influence. On this
point a hopeless confusion of standards and values arose,
and questions of art and questions of morality were inextric-
ably entangled. It sometimes happened that subjects con-
sidered by the modernists as matter mainly for artistic treat-
ment were regarded by the realists as matter for didactic
stories. Thus Artsybashev, who belongs to the realist school,
wrote a novel, Sanin, in which " I desire " is preached as the
sole law of conduct with the same seriousness and earnest-
ness with which realists of an earlier date inculcated in their
novels the necessity for teaching peasants the alphabet.
Even among the modernists the cool air of detachment char-
acteristic of French writers in dealing with such questions is
rarely met with. It must be noted, too, that a great deal
that was written during this period was the most ordinary
lubricity, produced to meet the prevailing demand, and
wholly unrelated to literature.
During the last few years the realists have, as has been
noted, practically abandoned the field to the modernists,
and, in fact, the distinction between modernists and realists
has become faint and shadowy, and the very names seem
like an echo of controversies that are still. The modernist
Literature 203
plea for form in art and for the recognition of beauty as the
chief concern of art has been generally accepted as valid.
All the distinguished names in Russian literature now are
those of authors who have been affected more or less deeply
by the modernist movement. The modernists are no longer
a narrow coterie. They have greatly increased in numbers,
have split up into various groups, publish their work in
nearly all the monthlies and in the daily papers, develop new
tendencies and cultivate new forms. For two or three years
the young poets of St. Petersburg, united in a society known
as the Society of Students of Russian Literature, eagerly
debated questions of style, metre, and rhythm under the
guidance of Viacheslav Ivanov. But now some of the younger
poets have revolted against their teachers and have founded
groups of their own known as " Acmeists," and " Futurists."
Largely as the result of the modernist movement Russian
literature is being studied with new interest. Fresh beauties
are constantly being discovered in the greatest of the Russian
poets, Pushkin ; and Tiutchev, the Russian " poet's poet,"
has been raised to the seat of honour due to him.
Valuable material illustrating the history of Russian
literature — especially during the first half of the nineteenth
century — is being constantly brought to light, and a spirit
of broad tolerance of various schools of thought is growing,
a taste for literature for its own sake.
The pioneer of the Modernist Movement is undoubtedly
Dimitri Merezhkovsky, and he has played an important part
in it during the later stages of its develop-
™ D V™ tn ment. Merezhkovskv is one of the most
Merezhkovsky. . J
prominent figures in Russian literature, not
so much by reason of his talent as on account of his restless
energy and the variety of his intellectual interests. He has
written several volumes of verse strongly marked by French
influence, but it is not as a poet that he will be remembered.
His function is rather that of a preacher, and in his brilliant
critical essays and in his historical novels he can never rest
204 Russia of the Russians
from preaching, indeed the aim of his criticism and his novel-
writing is to elucidate and to win adherents for certain broad
religious conceptions of history that for years have engrossed
him. Merezhkovsky is a widely-read man, with excellent
literary taste, a keen faculty of critical analysis and great
literary ability. In his series of novels, the Trilogy —
Julian the Apostate, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter and Alexis —
and the recently published Alexander I, he has undertaken
the gigantic task of tracing through the Christian Era the
development of a conflict between Christ and Antichrist.
The energy and perseverance with which Merezhkovsky has
carried his task through are not less surprising than the bold-
ness of the enterprise. That the result is of the highest
artistic or philosophical value cannot be affirmed. As pic-
tures of strikingly different historical epochs all four novels
are interesting, and there is about them an atmosphere of
keen curiosity, of intellectual restlessness that compensates
for many defects. An immense amount of historical material
has been collected and arranged with diligence and care and
sometimes with illuminating effect. To impart to all this
material the tragic intensity, the vast sweep suggested by
the conception on which the Trilogy is based would demand
a vitality, an energy of talent that Merezhkovsky does not
possess. He has far from succeeded in giving artistic form
to his philosophical conception of history. Many of his char-
acters are feebly drawn and archaeological details often
burden the narrative instead of being absorbed in its flow.
None the less this series of novels is a remarkable achievement,
and has had no small effect in Russia in stimulating interest
in religious questions, in art, and in the philosophy of history.
The main ideas that Merezhkovsky seeks to convey in his
novels and critical essays and in his speeches in the Religious
^Philosophical Society in St. Petersburg may be briefly stated
as follows. There are three epochs in the history of mankind
which represent a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis re-
spectively. The first is the pre-Christian epoch which
Literature 205
regarded God as being in the world and one with the world.
This was the epoch of the Father. The second is the Chris-
tian epoch, or epoch of the Son, in which prevails the religion
of God in man, God incarnate, the God-man. The third
epoch, which is now beginning, is that of the Spirit, or that
of the final union of Logos and Kosmos in one universal
Being, God-mankind. While Christianity was in its dynamic
creative period it hastened towards the final revelation, the
Apocalypse, which shall unite God with the world, the spirit
with the flesh, and heaven with earth. But when Christian-
ity became petrified in dogma and in monkish asceticism,
denied the phenomenal world in the name of a transcendental
God, and mortified the flesh for the sake of fleshless spirit,
it denied the religion of the Father and claiming to be the
whole truth became falsehood. Then the first half of the
truth, the thesis, that is to say, revolted against Christianity,
flesh against spirit, earth against heaven, the world against
God. The revolt began with the Renaissance, and is being
continued at the present day in anti-Christian culture in art,
science, philosophy, and in the revolutionary, social, and
political tendencies of public life. But the apparent godless-
ness of the modern world is really a wrestling with God like
that of Jacob, and the men of to-day are unconsciously
wrestling with God, not with the Father but with the Son.
And for that reason the godless men of to-day, the wrestlers
with Christ are nearer to Christ than the Christians are.
"And Christ," declares Merezhkovsky, "seeing that he has
not prevailed against the world, will say to it : ' Let me go,
for the day breaketh.' And the world will say to Christ :
' I will not let thee go except thou bless me.' And Christ
will bless it in the morning dawn, in the revelation of the
Spirit, in the third Covenant, and will give mankind a new
name, the name of God-Sonhood, God-Mankind."
This is the conception that lies at the basis of all Merezh-
kovsky's work, that constitutes the " message " of his his-
torical novels. In its development the influence of Nietzsche,
206 Russia of the Russians
and more especially of Dostoievsky, is clearly marked, and
the assertion that the final word establishing the synthesis
between the thesis and the antithesis of history shall come
from Russia recalls the teaching of the Slavophils. In his
acute and penetrating critical study Tolstoy and Dostoievsky ,
Merezhkovsky illustrates other aspects of the same idea, but
the rigorous application of the theory leads to a one-sidedness
which has the effect of obscuring the real greatness of Tol-
stoy. Merezhkovsky has published a number of critical
studies on Pushkin, Gogol, and other Russian and European
writers, and in essays in the monthlies and in the daily press,
most of which have been published in volume form, has
applied his religious and philosophical ideas to various phases
of Russian public life. It cannot be said that Merezhkovsky
has founded a school and there are few who accept his theories
in their totality. His style, in spite of a certain nervous
vibration that pervades it, lacks warmth and vividness. It
arouses intellectual curiosity rather than aesthetic or religious
emotion. But Merezhkovsky's services in stimulating the
movement of ideas in contemporary Russia are very great.
He is a tireless disturber of intellectual peace.
Madame Merezhkovsky, who writes verse and fiction under
her maiden name, Zenaida Hippius, and literary criticism
under the pseudonym of Anton Krainy, has been her hus-
band's chief assistant in the dissemination of his ideas. She
has published several volumes of short stories which are well
written but are devoted to the illustration of ideas rather
than to the development of emotional images. Madame
Hippius' best work is to be found, however, in her capricious,
fanciful verse, which hovers in dim backgrounds of instinct,
in borderlands of religious emotion, is blown hither and
thither by the gusts of other people's opinions, is half sincere
and again in earnest, toys with evil and yields to an impulse
to worship, is sentimental and half-human, takes on a serious
pose and fades away in mocking, elfish laughter. It is the
abstract," once wrote Madame Hippius, " that is dear to
Literature 207
me, with the abstract I build up life. ... I love everything
solitary and unrevealed. I am the slave of my strange,
mysterious words. And because of the speech that alone is
speech I do not know the words of this world." In
another poem, written in 1906, she speaks of swinging in
a net under the branches " equally far from heaven and
earth." Both pleasure and pain are a weariness, earth gives
bitterness, heaven only mortifies ; below no one believes,
above no one understands, and so, " I am in the net, neither
here nor there. Live, men and women ! Play, O children !
Swinging, I say ' No ! ' to all that exists. Only one thing
I fear ; swinging in the net, how shall I meet the warm,
earthly dawn ? " Madame Hippius' art is that of a twilight
world between sense and spirit where beauty has a spectral
quality and passion is an echo.
The modernist movement expressed itself most distinctly
as a poetical revival, and the leaders in this revival were
Balmont and Briusov, the former half-con-
A Poetical sciously, the latter of deliberate purpose.
Konstantin Konstantin Balmont is a poet for the sheer
Balmont. love of the music of poetry. In an autobio-
graphical note he writes that he grew up
among trees, flowers, and butterflies, that in his childhood
poetry gave him physical delight, and that he is quietly
convinced that no one in Russia before him knew how to
write melodious verse. In one of his poems he boasts that
all the poets that came before him were but his forerunners,
and that he first discovered the music of the Russian tongue.
The boast is one of the buoyant exaggerations habitual to
Balmont, but it is certainly true that no Russian poet has so
frankly revelled as he has in the mere sound of Russian
words, in their lilt, their melody, their resonance, their har-
monies. He has an extraordinary gift of improvisation, and
a~Taculty of most musically expressing fleeting, ethereal
emotions. Music and emotion blend in his verse and wander
down aimless ways of delightful discovery. There is a
208 Russia of the Russians
perpetual boyishness about Balmont, a cheerful recklessness, a
naivete that with the years tends to become a mannerism.
There is no profound philosophy in his poetry. It is the
everyday experience of a restless and delightfully irrespon-
sible egoist transformed into music. When Balmont tries to
be philosophical, when he burdens his poetry with occult or
mythological subjects his music fails him. " I came into
the world," he says of himself simply, " to see the sun and
blue horizons, I came to see the sun and mountain heights,
the sea and the rich colours of the vale. I have embraced
the worlds in one single glance, I am a sovereign, I have
conquered cold oblivion in fashioning my dream. Every
moment I am full of revelation — I am ever singing. It was
suffering that called forth my dream, but love, too, is mine.
Who is my fellow in power of song ? Not one, not one. I
came into this world to see the sun, and if daylight fail I will
sing, I will sing of the sun in my mortal hour."
During the revolutionary period Balmont wrote political
verse. He has consequently been compelled since 1906 to
live abroad, chiefly in Paris, and exile has had a paralysing
effect upon a talent of rare spontaniety. Balmont has trans-
lated into Russian the works of many foreign poets, including
Calderon and Shelley. He knows foreign languages well,
but he is too subjective to be a good translator, and his
version of the English poet is much more suggestive of
Balmont than Shelley. The English poet whom Balmont
most resembles in quality though not in range of talent, is
Swinburne.
Valery Briusov, the most distinguished of living Russian
poets, is as self-conscious and severe as Balmont is impetuous
and exuberant. Balmont made his poetical
Valery Briusov. discoveries by chance, as it were, by virtue
of an extraordinary inborn sensitiveness to
verbal music. Briusov has developed his poetical talent by
a course of stern self-discipline. He has chosen art as his
vocation, and devoted himself to it with the singleness of aim
Literature 209
that his Moscow merchant ancestors displayed in building up
their business. His manner is one of cold dignity and reserve.
He resents the frivolous display of emotion, and will not dis-
play his own until by careful search and mature reflection
he has discovered for it the absolutely fitting form. To
questions of form he devotes minute study, scrupulously
weighs words and sounds in the balance, tests variations of
rhythm and metre. Briusov has a passion for verse, not as
music merely, but as poetry in the very broadest sense. He
is a man of wide culture, and his verse is now simply an
elegant accomplishment, a neat and skilful way of saying
trifles, and now the concentrated expression of deep passion.
He is a sceptic, an enemy of facile enthusiasms and vague
generalisations, of religions that are to be had for the think-
ing of them. He is especially attracted by the cold, rhe-
torical Roman civilisation of the period of decline, with its
distaste for the crude illusions of the crowd. His favourite
theme is passion, passion untinged by religious mysticism,
passion on which satiety follows, which has in it the bitter
sweetness of death, and is akin to all the elemental destruc-
tive forces of the world. Briusov writes of Antony who,
' when Tribunes fought for the people and Emperors for
power, raised one altar — the altar of passion," and prays
that such a lot may be his, that he, too, may, in the hour of
decisive conflict when the battle is not yet finished, forsake
all and follow the Egyptian keel. In the revolutionary year
he welcomes the forces of destruction with all the eagerness
of the son of an outworn and decadent culture. " Where
are ye, O ye coming Huns, who are hanging like a cloud
over the world. I hear your leaden tramp on Pamirs yet
hidden from our eyes. Fall upon us from your dark camps,
a drunken horde, and quicken our decrepit body with a
wave of flaming blood." He bids them raze palaces and
thrones, burn books in bonfires and defile temples. " And
we, the wise men and poets, the guardians of mystery and
faith, shall bear away our lighted candles into catacombs,
210 Russia of the Russians
deserts and caves. ... It may be that everything will perish
that was known to us alone, but you who destroy me I meet
with a hymn of welcome."
In another poem, The Pale Horse, Briusov gives a singu-
larly vivid picture of the traffic in a city street, of the sudden
vision of a rider on a Pale Horse looming up in the sky, of
the horror of destruction that fell upon the crowd, and of the
passing of the vision and the renewal of the busy hum of the
street, leaving only a prostitute and a madman vaguely
stretching out their hands to where the vision had been. In
this poem Briusov displays great skill in the employment,
in a context of high poetical tension, of such prosaic words
as " newsboy," and " shop-sign," and such modern and
foreign words as " cab," " omnibus," and " automobile."
Briusov is a prose writer of distinction as well as a poet.
His Republic of the Southern Cross is a fantastic romance,
cold and artificial. The Fiery Angel is a romance dealing
with mediaeval witchcraft, full of curious occult learning.
The Altar of Victory, which appeared in the Russkaia Mysl
in 1912, is a story of that epoch in Roman history— the
fourth century a.d.- — which chiefly attracts the author's sym-
pathy. These works are marked by coldness, a lack of
humour and a defective sense of character, and the literary
skill and learning displayed in them do not avail to raise
them above the level of curious experiments. As a critic
Briusov is sober, penetrating, and exact, and his critical
essays, most of which were published in the review Viesy
(Scales), so ably edited by him during the years between
1903 and 1908, have been of great educative value. Briusov's
sympathies lean strongly to French literature and art, and
by means of his review he maintained a direct connection
between the French and Russian literary circles. A com-
plete edition of his works in twenty-five volumes is now in
course of publication.
Viacheslav Ivanov is a poet who has occupied in St. Peters-
burg a position similar to that occupied by Briusov in Moscow
Literature 211
as leader of the modernist movement. His home was for
several years a centre of literary debate, the place where the
younger poets assembled to read their poems,
I ano^ t° discuss literary and philosophical theory,
and simply to breathe an atmosphere charged
with new emotions and new ideas. Viacheslav Ivanov is a
classical scholar, studied for a time under Mommsen, and
wrote a dissertation called De Societatibus vectigalium pnbli-
corum populi Romani. Nietzsches' ideas influenced him
strongly, and he was attracted by the theories advanced by
Merezhkovsky. His earliest literary and philosophical essays
and a study called The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God
were published in Merezhkovsky' s review Novy Put (The
New Way), and to the young poets who gathered around him
in 1906 he declared that it was his desire to continue Merezh-
kovsky's work. Ivanov's wide learning, his subtle mind, his
knowledge of literary form, his eagerness to discover and
encourage talent, his curious power of giving a semblance of
authority and finality to all sorts of hazy religious and philo-
sophical ideas that were afloat in the atmosphere of the time
or were constantly being evolved by his fertile brain — all
these qualities combined with his great literary talent speedily
secured for him the position of a master. His manner was,
indeed, that of the priest of a new cult. From 1906 till 1912
he was the leader of a new poetical school. His poetry is
burdened with neologisms and learned allusions, and is full
of classical imagery and subtle parallels between Russian
and classical mythology. The strength of Viacheslav Ivanov's
talent is shown in the fact that it has wrought out of this
complex and difficult material a music that is new in Russian
poetry. The sources of inspiration are manifold and often
recondite and the personality revealed in the poems is
extraordinarily many-sided. Ivanov's poetry will never be
popular, but it is real and profound poetry, rich, tense, and
adventurous in ideas and form. It is like a garden of tropical
flowers transplanted by occult influences to Russian soil and
212 Russia of the Russians
mingling their heavy scent with the winds that sigh endlessly
over the great plain.
It is too early to discuss the character of Ivanov's influence
on the younger poets. In certain ways it can be seen to
have been harmful. It encouraged in some a superficial
modernism, coldly curious experimenting with the instinctive
and the sub-conscious, a pursuit of novelty in thought and
conduct for mere novelty's sake, an irresponsible toying with
religious emotion. But it is to Ivanov's teaching and example
that the younger St. Petersburg poets owe a deepened con-
ception of poetry as an art demanding the concentration of
their finest energies.
Of the younger lyric poets Alexander Blok has a greater
power of simple and direct appeal than any Russian poet
now living, and this power he exercises by
Alexander Blok. means of a shy reticence, by means of hints
and half-tonesT^by suggestive images lightly
drawn, and by music revealing such a passion for remote
beauty, such a fine sensitiveness to sorrowful and exquisite
meanings that it charms even the dusty prose of streets and
restaurants into dignity and nobility. Neither Briusov nor
Ivanov can touch the heart as Blok does. His verse is often
obscure. He does not relate, he only suggests, the vibra-
tions of his music touch feelings that are beyond the reach
of words. He records with intense sincerity the life of a
broken spirit that finds in expression a momentary solution
of the problem of its high sorrow. It is impossible, and it
would be useless if it were possible, to describe the matter
of Blok's poems — they are so extraordinarily subjective. To
say that there is a strongly mystical element in his poetry,
to say that he writes of love or nature or wine, that he feels
the poetry of the town, that in his later verse he gives expres-
sion to a deep and pure national feeling, and that in all his
work there is a tragical note, is to say nothing about the real
Blok who is to be known only through the music of his own
verse. Blok is still in the early thirties. He has published
ALEXANDER BLOK
Literature 213
several volumes of verse under the titles of Poems on the
Fair Lady, Unlooked-for Joy, The Snowy Mask, The Earth
in Snow, Songs of the Night, and a volume of lyrical dramas,
including Pulcinello, The King in the Public Square, and The
Strange Woman. He produces constantly, his talent is
steadily maturing, and the years before him are full of happy
promise.
Poetry is being so assiduously cultivated in Russia now that
a whole galaxy of minor poets has arisen, some of whom have
broken away from the authority of their modernist elders
and have tried to form schools on their own account, but
have not yet succeeded in producing anything strikingly
new.
There is one striking and enigmatical figure in contem-
porary Russian literature who is equally distinguished as a
poet and as a writer of prose, fiction, and
Feodor Sologub. drama. Feodor Sologub is the pseudonym of
Feodor Kuzmich Teternikov, formerly a pro-
vincial school-inspector, and now resident in St. Petersburg.
His father, who was a peasant and a shoemaker, died in St.
Petersburg when Sologub was a child. His mother secured
a position as housekeeper, and her two children, Feodor and
Olga, played together happily enough in the kitchen. The
master of the house was a kindly man and gave Feodor
enough education to enable him to become a primary school-
teacher. For several years Sologub taught in Vychegda, a
small town in the northern government of Vologda, and in
the course of time became a school inspector. It is one of
the paradoxes of modern Russian literature that a man with
such limited opportunities should have become a writer of
such force, originality, and polish as Sologub has, in his best
work, shown himself to possess. His early work was pub-
lished in the 'nineties in the review Sievemy Viestnik, but he
did not become widely known and recognised until after
1905. Sologub is a remarkable stylist, attaining without
apparent effort a flexibility and a verbal harmony that give
214 Russia of the Russians
distinction to almost everything he writes. His lyrics are
marked by a pessimism hardly relieved by a ray of any hope
except the chilly hope of death. Sometimes he mourns
plaintively over the darkness of the world and the futility of
life. Sometimes he accepts the world, but it is a world of
sin in which he takes evil as his guide and wanders at the
bidding of vice down dark labyrinths. " A sad, pale shadow,"
he writes in pensive lines, " a narrow, winding way, a dreary
and gloomy day — O heart forget about freedom ! Thou
art pale and sad with longing, thy breast breathes wearily,
dreams are shy and hardly come — O heart forget about
happiness."
Again he cries contemptuously, " We are imprisoned beasts
and howl as best we can. The doors are tightly shut and we
dare not open them. If our heart is true to tradition we
bark, comforting ourselves with our barking. That the cages
are filthy and foully smell we have long since forgotten, if
ever we knew it. To repetition the heart is accustomed, we
howl drearily and monotonously. Everything in the cages
is humdrum and ordinary, and of freedom we have long since
ceased to dream." Sologub writes of himself : ' I am the
God of a mysterious world, all the world is in my dreams
alone." Or again, he tells of how when he suffered ship-
wreck he called to his " Father, the devil," who saved him
in answer to his cry, " Suffer not my maddened soul to perish
before the time, I shall give up to the power of dark vice the
rest of my black days." In other poems by the magic of his
verse he gives a strange fascination to death. And yet in
the deserts of Sologub' s pessimism one may sometimes meet
with blue flowerlets of simple beauty watered by the morn-
ing dew of tenderness. Sologub is one of the most tantalising
of poets. He eludes all categories, mocks at his own words,
peers ironically at the reader and leaves him doubting whether
the poet is really at heart a pessimist, whether he really
delights in the savour of sin, whether he believes in God or
the Devil, whether he may not in the long run be simply
Literature 215
indifferent and the whole of his writings merely elegant
persiflage.
But he is not indifferent. He is suffering from some pro-
found sickness of the spirit which gives him no rest. And
to this sickness he has given subtle expression in a powerful
novel called Melky Bies (The Imp). This novel describes a
high-school master in a provincial town, Peredonov, a man
devoid of every high and noble quality, without a single
intellectual interest, vulgar, contemptible, vicious, stupid,
and cowardly. The wretched man is gradually entangled
in the net of his own errors and vices, and of the pettiness
and vulgarity of the people of the town he lives in, and he
perishes blunderingly, stupidly, blindly, knowing not why.
The evil in the man is symbolised by a shadowy little spirit,
an imp called the nedotykomka, the Impalpable One, which
appears from time to time perhaps as an hallucination of
Peredonov's, perhaps as a mere suggestion, a doubt, a fear,
perhaps as something half real. " It lives to terrify and
destroy him. Magic, multiform, it follows him, mocks him,
deludes him — now rolling on the floor, now pretending to be
a rag, a ribbon, a twig, a flea, a cloud, a little dog, a pillar
of dust in the street, and everywhere creeps and runs after
Peredonov. It has worn him out, exhausted him by its
rippling dance." But the presence of this symbolic element
only serves to heighten the realistic vividness of the story.
The life of a typical Russian town is described with a bitter
minuteness, with an almost morbid clarity of vision. The
life of the wretched Peredonov becomes in Sologub's presen-
tation a deep tragedy. In none of his works does the author's
artistic power reach such a pitch of intensity as in The
Imp.
The Imp was Sologub's second novel. His first, Evil
Dreams, showed great mastery of style, and the style was
brought to great perfection in several volumes of short stories
published between 1905 and 1908. These stories deal to a
large extent with the charm of childhood and the fascination
15— (2400)
216 Russia of the Russians
of death. Many of them are very beautiful, but in nearly
all is felt that savour of evil which is so characteristic of
Sologub. During the last few years a rapid decline, not to
say a collapse of this great talent has been noticeable, and
his later works are full of repellent elements no longer subdued
by the power of artistic impulse.
Sologub is well beyond middle age. There is a much
younger writer of prose, Aleksei Remizov, whose originality
of talent, mastery of form, and deep under-
Aleksei Remizov. standing of the Russian popular mind give
him a high place altogether apart from
other writers of talent. Remizov comes of a Moscow mer-
chant family, was educated in Moscow, has had a hard
battle with life, lived in the east and south of Russia, was
exiled to Vologda for some political affair with which he was
not directly concerned, and has since 1905 lived in St. Peters-
burg, often on the brink of extreme poverty. With amazing
persistence this quaint, retiring, unworldly man has pursued
his literary way. His gift is unique, and he refused to modify
its expression at the bidding of any demand of convenience
or expediency. He met with failure after failure. A few
discerning fellow-craftsmen recognised his talent, but to most
the work he succeeded in getting published seemed bizarre
and grotesque. Many even of the modernists refused to
acknowledge him. But he steadily fought his way, wrote as
he felt compelled to write, in spite of poverty and illness,
and gradually won recognition by the sheer force of his
talent and the intensity of his purpose. His style is wholly
his own, slow-moving, remote from the facile fluency of
journalistic Russian, full of the dignity of the popular speech
and of the spirit of those curious byways of Russian life
where tradition still lives on and where modern civilisation
has not done its blurring and levelling work. Remizov has
a sly humour, a taste for the grotesque and a tendency to
mystification that add greatly to the charm of his work,
though it was these very qualities that a few years ago
ALEKSEI REMIZOV
Literature 217
militated against his popularity. And then there is compassion
in him, a sense of the tragic movement of life and of far
ways of tear-stained deliverance. No living writer feels the
Russian people as he does, its clinging to the earth, its gross-
ness, its sensuality, its sense of sin, together with its spiritual
ardour, its religious beliefs, its quaint customs, its lich lan-
guage, and its incessant trouble and yearning and high dream
of victory. It is not an idealised people that he sees, doing
the things that a sociological theory declares it must be
doing, but a very real people that can be beast-like and yet
can see heavenly visions. Remizov has published eight
volumes of prose. His novels, The Pond and The Clock,
contain very realistic descriptions of the life of the petty
tradesman class. His later tales, The Irrepressible Fellow,
The Sisters of the Cross, and The Fifth Plague, display a strik-
ing power of depicting the grotesque, the repulsive and the
merely commonplace features of life in the provincial towns
and in the capitals as elements in a purifying tragedy the
significance of which the Russian people instinctively under-
stands. The tales are not merely narratives. They have
the concentrated art of poems in prose. Remizov has written
a number of prose-poems of another character — adaptations
of old-Russian apocryphal tales, the fantastically beautiful
variations on Biblical themes with which Byzantines, Greeks,
Southern Slavs, and the Russians of the Kiev and Moscow
periods satisfied their literary needs. His dramas, The Play
of the Devils, and Judas, Prince of Iscariot, are also based on
these legends. Besides a number of short stories on con-
temporary themes into which the element of the grotesque
largely enters Remizov has written charming fairy tales.
His work shows traces of the influence of Dostoievsky and
Gogol, and certain features are reminiscent of Leskov. But
these are the influences of kindred spirits and do not
detract from the striking originality which makes Remizov
the most interesting of contemporary Russian writers of
fiction.
218 Russia of the Russians
Literary criticism is in a transition stage in Russia at the
present moment, and there are no critics who are recognised
by all the schools. Reviews are nearly always
Criticism. si g ned , even in the daily papers, which devote
a considerable amount of space to what is
called " bibliography," the names of critics are generally
known, and the opinions of prominent critics carry great weight.
Professor Ovsianniko-Kulikovsky, formerly professor in
Kharkov, now editor of the literary section of the Viestnik
Yevropy, may be mentioned as a typical representative of
the old school of criticism, and Briusov, Ivanov, and Andrei
Biely of the new. Andrei Biely, a versatile young writer,
author of two volumes of poems and a novel called The Silver
Dove, describing the experiences of an " intelligent " amongst
members of a fanatical sect, has devoted a great deal of atten-
tion to metrical analysis, and by reducing to mathematical
formulae the metrical systems of Pushkin and other great
Russian poets, has obtained curious and interesting results.
During the last few years the number of readers has greatly
increased in Russia. The relaxation of the stringency of the
censorship in 1905 led to an increased literary
Increased output, and the political excitement of the
Books. °" period greatly stimulated the demand for
printed matter. At first it was newspapers
and endless pamphlets on political and social questions that
were most eagerly read and widely circulated, but after the
first keen interest in politics had died down in the disappoint-
ment of the period following on the dissolution of the First
Duma a demand arose amongst all those thousands who had
suddenly formed a habit of reading for literature of another
kind. And the production of literature that is not literature,
but simply reading matter, entertaining or lightly instructive,
as the case may be, received a powerful impetus. There was
a rage for cheap detective stories, adaptations of Sherlock
Holmes and of his American imitators. The rage passed,
but the habit of reading remained among a host of people
Literature 219
who up to that time had been indifferent to the printed page,
amongst shop-assistants and sempstresses, and all sorts of
minor Government employees, and amongst tradesmen's
families in provincial towns. Sometimes the new recruits
to the army of readers were well guided and acquired a taste
for books that led out into a wider world of thought and
interest. Many of the working men, for instance, who had
often borne the brunt of the bitter experiences of the time
of stress, were keen in their search for knowledge, found
their way to the best in Russian literature, and demanded
of their teachers in the workmen's clubs instruction in
science : at one time the workmen in St. Petersburg took
an extraordinary interest in astronomy.
But for the most part the taste of the new readers is very
indefinite, and indeed there has been of late such a conflict
and confusion of literary standards that the average reader
prefers to turn aside from the masters and rely simply on his
own instincts and preferences. This leads to a general lower-
ing of standards and to the spread of a literature of a very
meretricious quality. That is to say, between educated
readers of taste and the masses of the people who read cheap
books there is now growing up an average class of readers
like that broad class in Western countries which is unexact-
ing in matters of art, objects to mental strain in reading
and merely wishes to be amused. This is one of the symp-
toms of the spread of European influences. But at the same
time this broader public provides a promising field for ex-
periments in popularisation, and such experiments of the kind
as have been made have proved remarkably successful. There
is a restlessness in the Russian mind that will not suffer
soporifics for long and easily wearies of glittering imitations.
Popular historical works- — for instance, the volumes of well
illustrated, popular essays by distinguished professors on
the Emancipation of the Peasantry and on the Napoleonic
invasion published by the Moscow house of Sytin — have a
very wide circulation. The influence of a growing aesthetic
220 Russia of the Russians
demand is seen in the great improvement in the get-up of
the books now published. A few years ago nearly all books,
poetry and fiction, as well as science, made their appearance
before the world in monotonously grey or greenish covers on
which the title was printed in the plainest lettering. Koro-
lenko's, Gorky's, and Andreiev's early volumes all came out
in this sober style. Paper covers are still the rule — only
dictionaries and encyclopaedias come on to the market bound
in leather or cloth — but there is a great variety in the letter-
ing, the colouring, and the adornment of the exterior. There
are inevitable failures of taste, and the increasing numbers^
of translations of French novels with pictures on the covers
in glaring red, green, or yellow, do not add to the beauty of
the booksellers' windows.
The number of translated books on the market is probably
greater in Russia than in any large European country. The
reason lies not only in the eager curiosity of Russians in re-
gard to Western Europe which expresses itself in the annual
summer migration to Switzerland, France, and Italy. Trans-
lation was until recently the easiest and simplest form of
book-production because the Government had not signed
the Berne Convention and the copyright of foreign authors
did not extend to Russia. The knowledge of foreign lan-
guages is widespread, an army of translators was available,
and all the novelties of the European book-market were
hastily turned into Russian. It is not surprising that, given
a multitude of ignorant or unscrupulous translators and hack
publishers the results were often melancholy. A Moscow
firm kept a large staff of translators — mostly women — at
almost a sweating wage, whose duty it was to supply monthly
eighty printed pages of translated matter. A Russian stu-
dent in Berlin who provided his publisher in St. Petersburg
with translations of Gerhard Hauptmann's plays used to
farm out the work. When a new play of Hauptmann's
appeared he tore the book into sections and distributed the
pages among indigent students who translated for a song.
Literature 221
The collective result was sent to St. Petersburg by the entre-
preneur, who actually found the business profitable. But
the standard of translation is steadily rising, and now that
an Authors' Copyright Bill has been passed by Parliament
and the Russian Government is signing Literary Conventions
with the chief European countries abuses should be far less
frequent than they have been in the past. One result of
the abundance of translations is that the average educated
Russian has a much wider acquaintance with modern Euro-
pean literature in general than the average Frenchman or
Englishman. It says much for the good taste of the Russian
reading public that a cheap " Universal Library," started a
few years ago on the model of such enterprises as Reclaim's
Universal-bibliotek in Germany, and consisting almost en-
tirely of translations of the best current European fiction
has been strikingly successful. Its little yellow paper-covered
twopenny or threepenny volumes are to be seen in every
railway train.
That Russia under moderately favourable conditions cannot
fail to present a very extensive book-market a glance at the
map will show. Between St. Petersburg and Moscow, and
Tiflis and Vladivostock are hundreds of thousands of insati-
able readers, and with the gradual spread of education the
number is steadily growing. In almost every town, even the
smallest, there is a bookshop of some kind, and books sell.
There are nations that buy books and there are nations whose
citizens borrow, either from public libraries or from those
few neighbours who do buy. The Russians buy and borrow
too. Books are cheap. The average novel or volume of
travel or history costs half-a-crown or less. Translations of
costly foreign works frequently sell in Russia for half the
price of the original. Naturally this cheapness of price is
largely accounted for by the cheapness of the get-up of books,
and, with an improvement in their outward appearance it
may be expected that their price will rise. In fact it is
already rising, and books at two and three roubles (four and
222 Russia of the Russians
six shillings) are now very much more common than they
used to be.
Russian children begin to read early and read a great deal,
but it is remarkable that comparatively little original litera-
ture for children is produced. Children's books are well
printed and well illustrated, but most of them are translations
from foreign, chiefly English authors. Fenimore Cooper,
Mayne Reid, and Seton Thompson are as popular among
Russian boys and girls as they are in England and America.
Many Russian children early become acquainted with the
masterpieces of their own literature, with the poems of Push-
kin, Lermontov and Nekrasov, with Turgeniev's novels and
with the earlier tales of Tolstoy. On such works as these
they develop a literary taste which is too often blunted by
the dull, mechanical method of teaching literature in the
secondary schools.
It is frequently complained that Russian literature is de-
clining, that the national gift which, as manifested in the works
of Tolstoy, Turgeniev, and Dostoievsky, aroused the wonder
of Europe, has been lost amid the turmoil of recent years.
A golden age is past, it is said. Twilight has fallen. The
giants have gone to their rest, taking the secret of their power
with them. And the present generation, burdened with a
sense of its own weakness, is unable to lift its hands to create
boldly and greatly. Russian literature, it is urged, has aban-
doned the pursuit of truth for the pursuit of recondite sen-
sation and form. But this is not a fair presentment of the
case. It is true that there are no giants now. But the
general level of literature is much higher than it was. The
care for form does not constitute a breach with the best
traditions of Russian letters. It was in the poetry of Pushkin
and Lermontov that modern Russian literature came to its
full strength at the beginning of the last century, and it was
the mastery of form gained in poetic creation that made
possible the succeeding remarkable development of prose
fiction. The recent poetical revival is again in its turn
Literature 223
leading to new developments in prose. The resources of the
language are being explored with new zest, and with happy
results. New words and new combinations of words are
being discovered, new harmonies and a new power of
suggestion.
But the question of form has wider implications. Tolstoy
once said to me at the beginning of 1905 : —
' The writers of the present day write well. Every young
lady knows how to write better than Turgeniev or I. But
the trouble is that they have nothing to say."
Tolstoy did not favour the modern school. Of the younger
writers Kuprin was the only one whom he praised unreservedly.
He disliked everything that was suggestive of artificiality in
style, everything that made an author unintelligible to the
masses of the people. With his view that art was a means
of deepening fellowship among men by means of an infectious
quality in style he could not approve of those forms of art
that failed to make a direct and simple appeal to the average
man. He was a passionate lover of music, but he found
Wagner ridiculous. The whole modernist movement seemed
to him symptomatic of perverted taste. His long wrestling
with purely ethical questions, his proud rejection of his own
art, his yearning for simplicity as for a cooling, healing
draught, all militated against his appreciation of modern
Russian art with its impatience of the unadorned.
But the Russian writers of to-day are not so remote from
Tolstoy as they seem. They share his restlessness, they,
too, are engaged in that great spiritual adventure on which
he and Dostoievsky set out. They are more closely akin to
Dostoievsky it is true than to Tolstoy. They are broadening
out the tracks that Dostoievsky blazed, they are developing
his hints and suggestions ; they have learned from him to
press on into the dark recesses of the human soul, with a
heavy heart, but with a constant energy of discovery, drawn
on by a tantalising presentiment of light within the darkness.
In their journey of psychological discovery they have in new
224 Russia of the Russians
forms, in a developed style, an indispensable instrument.
New rhythms and harmonies awaken hitherto unsuspected
vibrations, refine perception, and awaken a more complex
sensation of reality. The modernists have that delight in
form for its own sake, without which art is not art. With
some this assumes a voluptuous quality which is heightened
by the sensation that they are holding an aesthetic banquet
in time of plague, that they are quaffing from death's heads
the wine of their exaltation. The very sadness, the intense
morbid depression that pervades modern Russian literature
are strangely attuned to an invincible sense of beauty. All
the effort of the moderns is simply part of that unresting
roaming of the Russian over the wide expanses of the soul,
from hot sunlit plains and valleys by a Southern Sea to
misty tundras on the confines of the night. There are ele-
ments of falsity in the literary work of the last few years.
There is frequently an aping of foreign models, an eager
desire to be up to date, to say in Russian the very last word
that has been said in French, a readiness to be deluded by
mere phrases, a frequent lack of taste in the handling of deli-
cate subjects. But in its main tendency this work is wholly
Russian. x\nd to Tolstoy it is akin in one fundamental
quality, in a certain, almost childlike regardlessness of con-
sequences. Tolstoy in his passion for morality denied and
despised his own splendid achievements in art. " Let art
and the whole tremendous fabric of modern civilisation
perish," he seemed to be crying, " only let the soul of man
find salvation and peace." The writers of recent years have
done almost the reverse. It is not that in the pursuit of
aesthetics they have trampled on ethics. They are often
enough impelled by ethical and religious unrest. But in
their impetuous search they broke down ethical barriers,
wandered in forbidden fields, ignored all standards without
regard for possible social consequences. That the effect of
much of recent literature on many weaker natures has been
disastrous, that characters have been broken, lives ruined,
Literature 225
that the wandering of literature in a country without bounds
has oppressed many with a sense of the endless nothingness
of life, that too great a knowledge of evil may kill the desire
to live — such considerations as these do not deter Russian
writers in their pursuit. The tremendous human waste to
which their work may probably lead does not stay, their
hand. ' What of the waste and ruin," they would probably
say, " if by collective strain and effort, if by the suffering of
all, the end at last be reached ? " There is something fateful
in this indifference to immediate consequences. The Russian
conquest of the great plain involved through the centuries
a terrible sacrifice of human life, was effected at the cost of a
brutal disregard of the fate of millions. Russian literature
in its great effort to conquer a boundless spiritual plain is
again and again impelled by the same reckless impulse. It
sacrifices vital instincts and goodness itself for the sake of
some remote glimmering of the best of all, a hint of which
may sometimes be caught in the wailing of " Lord have
mercy upon us," in some village church. For Russia is most
terribly Christian in a sense of which perhaps only the East
has the secret. Such a sense of sin, such a sense of the power
of evil as the Russians have is possessed by no other people
in the modern world. ' We writers and readers have one
thing in common," declares Andrei Biely; "we are all in
the hungry, barren Russian plains where the evil one has been
leading us from of old." While others say that from Russia
shall come the final word of deliverance.
Over the later years of Russian literature, over nearly all
the period of development here described, Tolstoy stood guard
in his home in Yasnaya Polyana. Throughout the 'eighties,
the period of paralysing reaction, his doctrine of non-resis-
tance to evil permeated Russian society and attracted many
sympathisers. Tolstoy preached, expounded his religious
teachings in writings that passed in manuscript from hand to
hand, and led a simple life. Towards the end of the 'eighties
a fresh spirit of resistance arose and Tolstoy's direct influence
226 Russia of the Russians
diminished. He wrote his charming popular tales, felt again
and again the artistic impulse, but checked it sternly or else
yielded to it with a bad conscience. It is, perhaps, not alto-
gether fanciful to see a connection between the rising energy,
the new social movement of the nineties and the return of
Tolstoy's artistic power which was manifested in the publi-
cation of his novel Resurrection in 1899. Tolstoy was very
sensitive to the spirit of the times. But he stood apart from
the popular movement, and although younger literary men
frequently came to him to express their veneration or to ask
his advice he held aloof from literary circles, and literary
disputes. For a time he looked with interest and favour on
the Sievemy Viestnik, the first organ of the modernists, and
printed in it his Master and Man. But his eyes were con-
stantly set on things with which the literature of the day
had little concern. And the writers in the capital in their
turn ceased to pay attention to Tolstoy. His works were
widely read, the country was proud of him, especially proud
of the interest his personality aroused abroad. But he was
a great figure in the background, exerting a subtle moral
influence the character and extent of which it was very
difficult to gauge during the years of turmoil. He did not
sympathise with the Constitutional movement which seemed
to him, with his Christian anarchist attitude, to be merely
an attempt to expel evil by means of evil. Still less did he
sympathise with the reaction.
Tolstoy's eightieth birthday on August 28 (O.S.), 1908,
was the signal for an outburst of popular enthusiasm which
the measures taken by the Government to repress its mani-
festation only served to deepen. During the later years the
spiritual struggle that all his life long had given Tolstoy no
rest deepened in intensity, and in November, 1910, all Russia
and all the world were startled by the news that the old man
had made the final renunciation, that he had gone out from
his home into the night, accompanied by his daughter and
his secretary to live the remnant of his days wholly and
Literature 227
unreservedly in accordance with the truth as he perceived it.
There was the journey to a monastery, the attempt to travel
southwards to the Black Sea coast, the illness, the last days
on the wayside station of Astapovo, the quiet passing, and
then the impressive laying to rest in the presence of a great
throng, without incense or priestly prayer, in the garden of
Yasnaya Polyana.
The days when Tolstoy lay dying were days of national
exaltation such as only those who lived in the midst of it
can realise. It was as though a wave of purifying and up-
lifting emotion had swept across the country revealing the
best that was in every man. And this high and solemn
emotion lingered on for many weeks after Tolstoy was at
rest.
During the following years Tolstoy's manuscripts were
sifted by his daughter, and there was given to the world a
posthumous series of novels and tales that seemed like a pro-
jection of the best traditions of the older literature into a
new and swiftly changing world, a sober reminder that
Russian literature if it be many-sided is still one, and
that its great sacrifice is not sheer folly, but a foretaste of
overcoming.
On Dostoievsky's grave in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra,
just outside the busiest quarter of St. Petersburg, are inscribed
the words that he used as the motto of his Brothers Karamazov :
'' Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die it
abideth alone : but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit."
There are no words that more truly express the spirit and
meaning of Russian literature.
CHAPTER VII
MUSIC
No people in the world is altogether unmusical, but there
are some peoples for whom music is an exception, an occa-
sional yielding to innate human impulse, and
Music. there are others for whom it is a rule and a
delight. When Professor Oldenburg, the
secretary of the Russian Academy of Sciences, visited Chinese
Turkestan a few years ago he was struck by the fact that the
people, in spite of dire poverty, in spite of the oppression of
Chinese officials, were irrepressibly musical, that they were
constantly breaking into song. It seemed to Professor Olden-
burg that such an invincibly light-hearted people must be
of Aryan race even though it spoke Turkish. But a neigh-
bouring Turkish nomad people, the Kirghizes, are gifted both
poetically and musically. The Volga Tartars, again, another
people of Turkish tongue, though they have songs of their
own, sometimes very touching and melodious, cannot be
described as musical.
The Russians are a people for whom music is a delight.
The air is full of music and the people are always humming
a song or thrumming an instrument. Of all the books in the
book-hawker's bag none have a better sale than the song-
books. During haymaking songs come floating across the
fields, and the peasant women sing when they are picking
fruit or gathering peas and beans or digging potatoes. On
Sundays and holidays the girls of the village walk to and
fro in pairs singing endlessly. The youths follow, one of
them playing an accordion. The balalaika, a sort of tri-
angular guitar, was formerly the favourite instrument of the
peasants, but the accordion is fast superseding it, and is used
to accompany the older Russian dances which are still popular
in many villages, as well as the new-fangled Western dances,
the pas d'Espagne and so forth, which are rapidly spreading
228
Music 229
over the country together with town finery. In the first,
more good-humoured stage of drunkenness a Russian work-
man, cabman, or peasant almost invariably sings hoarsely
and discordantly some wildly sentimental song, although
an interruption of the song may very easily lead to a torrent
of violent oaths and the breaking of limbs. But it is curious
how persistently a drunken peasant will resume his trolling
even after frequent interruption ; there could hardly be a
clearer indication of the inevitableness of song for the Russian
peasant as a means of expressing emotion.
From the very dawn of their history the Russians have
been a singing people. They worked, they danced, they
revelled to the accompaniment of music.
A pfo n fi ng The " ba y an " or bard ' the sin & er of heroic
songs, was a prominent figure at the courts of
the early Russian princes, and the " guslar " or player on
the "' gusli ' or lyre was always present at the feasts of
warriors or merchants. The " skomorokhy " or jesters jested
in song, and in spite of perpetual ecclesiastical prohibitions
of the secular songs or " devil's music " that celebrated pagan
deities or expressed a sheer reckless delight in living, the
people clung to these songs and handed them down from
generation to generation, words and melody closely linked
in characteristic unity. The Russians, including the Great
Russians of the North, the White Russians of the West, and
the Little Russians of the South, have preserved an extra-
ordinary wealth of folk-song, which was diligently recorded
during the first half of the nineteenth century by a number
of collectors, while even now careful gleaners in remote
country districts may still gather fresh songs to add to the
rich harvest. There are songs of the seasons, ritual songs
reminiscent of the days of nature-worship and celebrating
the return of the sun after the shortest day, the coming of
spring and the summer equinox, all dates of primary impor-
tance in the husbandman's calendar. These songs were later
adapted to the Christian festivals of Christmas, Whitsuntide,
230 Russia of the Russians
and St. John's Eve, but they retain, hardly disguised, the
traces of their heathen origin. The complex ceremony of
peasant weddings was, and in many places still is, accompanied
with endless singing. There are splendid epic songs, the so-
called byliny relating the exploits of semi-historical, semi-
mythical personages in the regions of Kiev, Novgorod, and
Moscow. And lyrics of love, warfare, and death, unconnected
with seasons, ritual observances or historical events, are to
be heard in every corner of Russia on any day of the year.
A number of the songs sung by Russian workmen during
their work have been used by the German Professor Bueher
in support of his theory that the rhythm of poetry and song
had its origin in the rhythm of the physical effort of lifting
heavy weights, or hauling, dragging, sawing, or rowing.
Nearly all these songs are traditional, and though certain
districts have lyrics of their own, not a few of the songs are
spread over wide areas, which is not surprising considering
the wandering habits of the people and the lack of natural
barriers. But there are frequent variations, both in words
and melody, and these variations are by no means always
due to errors of transmission. They are often simply the
result of the play of the artistic instinct. This is particularly
true of variations in melody. When peasants sing there is
often a combination of solo and chorus, and in the chorus
there is a kind of part singing which as often as not seems to
be based on free improvisation, with rollicking twists and
twirls and a racing above and below the melody. The soloist,
too, often makes variations on the melody while retaining
the fundamental pattern with sufficient exactness to make
it clearly recognisable.
In Russian folk-songs words and music are hardly separ-
able, while often both are so intimately connected with dancing
that the sound of them sets a peasant's feet involuntarily
tripping or his hands clapping. The words alone fail to give
the full effect of the song, though with their rhythm, their
reiteration, their assonance and their striking imagery the
u
o
W
O
<
>
Music 231
songs as pure lyrics make a strong appeal to the imagination,
and through Pushkin and other poets influenced the develop-
ment of Russian literature in the last century. But it is
the strange, quaint melody of the songs that lifts the words
out of that region of folk-rhetoric in which they frequently
seem to linger, and carry them home. These melodies are
as truly expressive of the national spirit as the language
itself, are indeed in some way linked with the language and
present more definitely, with greater liberty from the necessi-
ties of concrete description, the music that is implicit in the
language. There are resemblances between Russian melodies
and those of other Slav peoples like the Poles and the Czechs,
and to a slighter extent, those of the Baltic peoples, the
Lithuanians and the Letts. A few resemblances have been
noted, too, between Russian and Finnish melodies, but these
latter are probably the result of borrowing, and the marvel
is, considering the infectious character of the popular airs,
that so few parallels to Russian folk-music have been found
among the neighbouring peoples. The folk-song is most
characteristically Russian, and while in Little Russian melo-
dies there are occasionally approximations to West European
melodic structure, the Great Russian folk-song seems to have
a style absolutely distinct from that of the Germanic and
Romance peoples, and, as far as is known, from that of
Eastern music. But the possible remoter connections of
Russian folk-music have hardly been studied yet, and in
any case the music has such a distinctive quality of its own,
that it may well be taken, as the best Russian composers
have taken it, as a basis for the development of a national
school of music.
Russian folk-music must be heard in its natural environ-
ment to be truly appreciated. Transferred to the concert -
hall it nearly always suffers some modifica-
tion that mars its native quality. Composers
in transcribing or adapting it frequently introduce inter-
vals that are suggestive of Western rather than Russian
16 — (2400)
232 Russia of the Russians
music, harmonise it in a conventional manner, try to
smooth down its roughness and to prevent its seeming to
the average listener too odd and too remote. Sung under
such conditions by ladies and gentlemen in evening dress to
the accompaniment of stringed instruments that are popular
only in name but are in reality as artificial as all the appur-
tenances of the concert-hall, the Russian folk-song is only a
faint and muffled echo of its original self. It cannot, in fact,
be transferred to the concert-hall as a song. But that is not
to say that it must be left to perish in its native fields, as it
is bound to perish with the extension of technical civilisation.
It will continue to serve as it has served for the last fifty years
as material for modern composers. As themes in symphonies,
sonatas, orchestral accompaniments, and as operatic airs
these spontaneous melodies will live on in a more complex
world of art.
It is when you get away from the neighbourhood of the
railway line into some sleepy region where the " sokha " or
wooden plough is still in use, and where men wear curious, old-
fashioned hats instead of the peaked caps common near the
towns, that there is hope of hearing Russian songs in some-
thing like their purity. Best of all if the women are singing
in the fields during harvesting. Perhaps their voices are
harsh, perhaps they show a tendency to sing through the
nose, but when they are singing in chorus, cheering each
other at work among yellow sheaves on the riverside in the
light of the afternoon sun the harmony between people,
landscape, and the plaintive melody of the song seems com-
plete. What seems to us the plaintiveness of most Russian
melodies does not, however, mean that they are necessarily
sad. Perhaps this apparent plaintiveness is simply the ex-
pression of some intimate correspondence between the Russian
mind and that great expanse which has been the home of the
Russians for centuries. But there is a wide play of varied
emotion in these folk-melodies. Sometimes they express
monotony, sorrow, solitude, as in the very familiar melody
Music 233
of the song, " One birch tree in the field," in which the four-
fold reiteration of a slowly-falling cadence at the end of sets
of three bars gives a peculiar effect of hopeless loneliness.
The wedding songs, too, are very mournful, the bride con-
stantly expressing her bitter grief at leaving her home, her
father and mother, and going out to a cheerless life among
strangers. The gloominess of the Russian peasant woman's
attitude to marriage is striking. To judge by the songs and
by the wailing of the relatives it might be imagined that
marriage was a calamity hardly less grave than death itself.
But the songs again bear witness to the contrary, and though
maidens frequently complain in songs of their sad and bitter
lot and of the faithlessness and the " consciencelessness " of
lovers, they often sing very artfully of their victories. It is
remarkable, indeed, how much real humour there is in many
Russian melodies, and how much humour the peasant youths
and maidens can put into them by means of appropriate
gestures and modifications of the voice. Often the humour
of Russian melodies consists in a kind of parody on plain-
tiveness, sometimes in the arch trippingness of songs that
go on and on endlessly eluding pursuit. Not only is there
humour in Russian airs, but there is a fine rollicking sense of
space and freedom not altogether unlike that which is found
in the older English sea-songs. It is the sense of the steppe,
or of broad rivers like the Volga, the Dnieper, or the Don,
or of the Black Sea over which Cossacks roved in their plun-
dering expeditions. It is the delight in a shirokoie razdolie,
a broad rolling expanse in which a man can draw deep breath,
shake off all trammels and feel the strength that is in him.
All this is in the Russian folk-melodies and a world of emotion
besides. Not all the melodies are quaint and stirring. Some
are simply dull and colourless, and others are depressing.
Folk-songs are not always charming simply because they
are folk-songs. There are many points at which inspiration
fails just as in the world of art, and often instead of new
melodies one finds simply combinations or adaptations of
234 Russia of the Russians
well-known airs. But even making allowance for such waste
spaces there is such a wealth of melody, such an originality
in Russian folk-music that even custom, the accordion, and
the gramophone itself cannot stale its infinite variety. When
one gets a little weary of Great Russian music one can turn
to the music of Little Russia, and indeed, there is no chance
of one ever growing sated, for the older folk-music is gradually
slipping away from the hearts of the people who alone can
keep it living a natural life.
It is melancholy that the folk-songs should be disappear-
ing, but it is inevitable that it should be so. The people
would not be the people if in face of a general
Decline of modernisation of life it preserved its customs,
its costumes, and its songs exactly in the
form in which archaeologists and ethnologists and all lovers
of the beauty of an older day seen in the perspective of the
twentieth century would like to have them kept. Peasants
are not figures in a museum. They are living human beings
whose main concern is to live as best they can in a changing
world. They wear leather boots instead of bast shoes, if
they can buy them. And it is just as natural that they
should abandon the reed-whistle for the balalaika and the
balalaika for the accordion. After all, it is not very certain
whether the balalaika was originally a Russian instrument.
It may have been borrowed from the Tartars, or adapted
from a Kirghiz instrument of a similar type named the
" domra." The " gusli," a kind of zither, another instru-
ment that has almost disappeared, may not be purely Russian
in spite of its Slavonic name. The neighbouring peoples,
both Turkish and Finnish, have similar instruments, and
perhaps the gusli was borrowed long since from the Greek
South, just as the accordion has been borrowed at a later
day from the German West. Since the peasants change
their instruments it seems natural that they should change
their songs, too. A few of the folk-songs have come into the
town and are sung without spirit by underpaid Government
Music 235
clerks in uniform, making anaemic efforts to be cheerful
in the white nights of May in summer cottages on the
outskirts of St. Petersburg. But for a half-dozen devital-
ised folk-songs that find their way into the towns a hundred
tinkling town songs find their way into the country. The
true folk-song is being replaced by the chastushka, or topical
ditty, representing a state of mind which is shallow and
commonplace compared with that represented in the folk-
song The factories, which lump together large masses of
men and women, blur their individuality and cut them off
from the calming and healing influences of nature are very
largely responsible for this. The songs born of minds wearied
by a long day's mechanical work indoors to the sound of
roaring machines cannot possibly have the freshness and the
depth of the songs of the forest and the open field. They
are of necessity shallow and sentimental, and the airs to which
they are sung will be imitations of the cheap and sentimental
airs made familiar through the gramophone or through such
cheap concert-halls as the workers may have access to. The
factory songs quickly find their way to the country, and so,
instead of pretty appeals to the winds to bear a message to a
lover about a dream his maiden dreamed about a broken
ring, the village girls on holidays walk about arm in arm
singing to a colourless and sentimental air a song of town
life telling how " Evening falls, the compositors are going
(to work), and poor Marusia is being carried to the Obukhov
Hospital " (in St. Petersburg). Then follow lustreless verses
describing how Marusia's friends asked the doctor and the
nurse to let them see her ; but Marusia was already in the
morgue, and in the end they learned that she had poisoned
herself for love.
One may mourn that the quaint old songs should be thrust
into oblivion in favour of such dreary banalities. But it
must be admitted that songs about compositors, hospitals,
and suicide make a much more direct appeal to peasant girls
living around the St. Petersburg of to-day than picturesque
236 Russia of the Russians
old songs descriptive of the exploits of the insurgent Stenka
Razin on the Volga. There is more art in the older songs,
but the spontaneity of popular art fades away in the atmos-
phere of the modern towns. The native impulse must, under
the changed conditions, be supported by the resources of
modern art. But there are difficulties which will be referred
to later. The " chastushki " are often freely improvised on
current events or on well-known persons in the village by
more or less skilful singers. With a given pattern of metre
and melody and considerable room for disposing of super-
fluous syllables such composition presents no insuperable
obstacles. Collections of " chastushki ,: have been made
which have a certain value as documents of the period, but
are musically and poetically trivial. More interesting is
another and earlier type of song which has to a large extent
taken the place of the folk-song. It is hard to give this type
a general name ; perhaps if the most recent type is to be
described as the factory ditty, the more indefinite type may
be described as the song of the artisans and petty tradesmen
who felt the modernising influences of the nineteenth century
before the factory had attained its present dimensions. But
the type includes regimental songs as well, and the army
has been and is, in its way, almost as effective as a levelling
force as the factory itself. The difference between the army
and the factory in this respect is that the former naturally
maintains a closer contact with tradition, especially with the
fighting tradition of the nation. These regimental songs,
and the songs of the petty tradesmen and artisans long ago
became the stock music of the " traktirs," or popular eating
and drinking houses and many acquired a traditional char-
acter, so that frequently they were confused with the genuine
folk-songs. In the song-books in circulation among the
people it is these songs that hold the chief place, and Nadiezhda
Plevitskaia, a peasant woman from Kursk who a few years
ago made a momentary sensation in the capitals as a singer
of folk-songs, had hardly a real folk-song in her repertoire.
Music 237
What she sang was simply such a well-known pseudo-folk-song
as " The bold young merchant Ukhar," or that song about
the great fire of Moscow in which Napoleon is described as
standing in a grey overcoat and saying to himself with " the
still voice of consciousness " that " Fate plays with man
and is fickle ever."
Another type of song that is often confused with the folk-
song is that of the songs sung by the gipsy choirs which
perform in the larger restaurants frequented
Gipsy Songs, chiefly by the merchants. Occasionally these
choirs do sing real folk-songs, occasionally
real gipsy airs, but just as often as not the songs they sing
have found their way to Russia from town to town, from
restaurant to restaurant right across Europe. If the gipsy
choirs have a remote connection with the people on one side,
they are much more closely connected on the other with
that cafe-chantant world which in various ways passes on to
the people trivial and facile modern airs that are caught up
as a makeshift for interpreting the hasty and superficial
emotions of a new time.
The people is, in fact, musically in a helpless position at
the present moment. All sorts of natural forces are crowding
out the quaint, distinctive, traditional folk-
Modern music, and flooding the country with nonde-
Influence on . t- . „. , . .
Native Music. scn Pt> semi-European airs. 1 he people submits
to this natural process. The striving of the
younger generation after modernity, polish, gentility, is per-
force satisfied by the musical scraps flung down by the noisy
machinery of European civilisation in the dreary, dusty,
untidy streets in the workmen's quarter on the outskirts of
the great cities. The people is unable to exercise any selec-
tive power, and so far it has been helped very little. A great
deal could be done to develop native musical taste by the
organisation of popular choirs, as is shown by the example
of the Finns, Letts, and Esthonians, whose village choirs and
annual choral festivals in various towns in Finland, in Reval,
238 Russia of the Russians
in Esthonia, and in Riga, the Lettish centre, have done a
very great deal to raise the general level of musical capacity
in the respective nationalities. In Russia only sporadic
attempts have been made so far to organise popular choirs
— in connection with certain philanthropic institutions in the
towns, for instance — and, indeed, the villages have been
hitherto so neglected in the most essential respects that
probably other forms of organisation, such as fire-brigades
and co-operative societies, will have to precede that of glee-
clubs. Until recently the political conditions were such
as to prevent all kinds of organising work among the
peasantry, but it now seems possible that village choirs
will soon take their place among the many factors of change
that are rapidly transforming country life in Russia.
One of the impediments to secular musical organisation
in the country, and to a large extent in the towns also, is
that there is no centre around which to organise. In Fin-
land, Esthonia, and in the Lettish country, the Church, which
in these regions is Protestant, serves very frequently as the
necessary rallying-point, if there is no other centre sufficiently
influential. But the Orthodox Church does not encourage
the cultivation of secular music within its precincts. Attempts
made during the early part of the nineteenth century to hold
concerts in connection with church services were soon put a
stop to, and though the Church does not oppose good secular
music now as it did the folk-music of the older time, it does
not give any opportunities for disseminating it among the
people. The musical instruction it gives is like all the in-
struction in the parish schools purely ecclesiastical. But it
is fortunate that it does at any rate give instruction in
ecclesiastical music, and through the parish choirs maintains
a certain level of musical taste in a time of rapid change.
Church music occupies a position akin to popular music
as a source of modern developments. In its way ^Russian
church music is very national and distinctive, though it cer-
tainly shows more traces of foreign influence than the
Music 239
folk-song. There is at least as much modern art as ancient
tradition in the magnificent singing of the Metropolitan's
Choir in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St.
T th C [ h S1C h° f Petersburg, for all that it seems to untrained
ears so strikingly Eastern. But there is a real
basis of Eastern tradition. Russian church music is derived
from that of the Greek church of Constantinople and from
the music of the early Bulgarian church. The tradition was
handed down through the troubled middle-ages of Russian
history, partly by means of a notation called the " signs,"
or the " hooks," partly through occasional reinforcements
of Greek ecclesiastics for whose benefit the Greek text was
long retained side by side with the Slavonic in the service-
books. But there were natural variations in the course of
the centuries, and radical reforms were effected in the time
of Ivan the Terrible and during the seventeenth century.
During Catherine's reign French and Italian influences made
themselves felt in church music, hardly to its advantage, and
all through the nineteenth century there was a conflict between
a Westernising and a nationalist school of ecclesiastical
music.
Russian church music thus bears a composite character,
and several of the most popular masses composed during
the last century have a predominantly Western and modern
colouring. Towards the end of the century several specialists
in church music, of whom Feodor Lvovsky and Stepan
Smolensky were the chief, did a great deal in transposing
for modern use ancient Russian, Greek, and Bulgarian music.
The intrusion of foreign elements, though it sometimes lessens
the impressiveness of Russian church music, has not availed
to rob it of its distinctiveness, and indeed the whole ritual
of the Eastern service sets certain very definite limits to
change. The Slavonic language of the prayers has a regu-
lative effect upon the music, and all the Greek suggestions
in ritual terminology, in vestments, and other ecclesiastical
forms prevent a too sudden break with tradition. Several
240 Russia of the Russians
of the best modern Russian composers, like Chaikovsky and
Rimsky-Korsakov, have paid considerable attention to ecclesi-
astical music, and Chaikovsky's liturgy is sung every year-
on Whitsunday in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St. Peters-
burg. Concerts of church music are frequently given in the
capitals, but in the concert-hall such music seems to lose
its essential quality and to become too plainly modern and
uninteresting. There is a Choirmasters' Society in St. Peters-
burg, and in all the towns and villages of the Empire priests,
deacons, monks, cantors, and choirmasters or regenty make
efforts to spread the knowledge of ecclesiastical singing as a
branch of ritual observance. In all this there is a great deal
that is coldly official, a great deal of uninspired effort to
furbish up, modernise and popularise tradition. But singing
is singing, and Russian church music at its very worst never
lacks some touching note of other-worldliness, while at its
highest it subtly stirs in a way that no other music can, a
strange complex of worshipping emotion in which predominates
a humbling and deeply penitent sense of sin.
The older church music is retained to a large extent in the
services of the Old Believers, whose nasal mode of singing
resembles that practised in Greek churches in the East
at the present day. The music of the other Russian sects
presents a wide and interesting field for study. Some-
times the psalms and hymns of the Dissenters are sung to
familiar fragments of church music ; but very often, and this
is particularly true of the hymns of the Khlysty and the
Skoptsy, folk-songs, folk-melodies form the basis of their
psalmody. The modern Westernising sects adapt for their
own use English and American revival hymns. There is one
other type of song that may be included in the category of
popular music, namely, the revolutionary songs that were in
vogue a few years ago. They were not popular songs in the
strict sense of the word. Most of them were written by
students or other educated revolutionaries. The melodies
were not original, but were adapted from folk-songs and other
Music 241
familiar airs. There was an adaptation of the Marseillaise,
and one of the most affecting of all the revolutionary songs
was sung to the music of a well-known military funeral march.
It is curious that the revolutionary period did not produce
a single song of original poetical beauty and deep passion,
and this is especially noticeable if the revolutionary songs
are compared with some of the sectarian hymns — those of
the sect of the New Israel for instance — produced during the
same period. Perhaps the moment of political upheaval is
unfavourable to artistic production, and in any case in Russia
the revolution as a political movement did not find striking
expression either in literature or art, and certainly not in
music.
All the manifold forms of traditional and popular music
have served as a basis for the development of a modern
school of Russian music. Such a musical
Developments. P eo P le as the Russian could not fail in adapt-
ing the technique of Western civilisation to
its own uses to express itself in the forms of modern music.
And here it had less ground to make up than in other spheres
of art, modern music being after all such a recent discovery.
French and Italian music had a certain influence in Russia
at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nine-
teenth century, and in the first half of the nineteenth century
there were obscure quasi-national composers, most of whom
are forgotten now except Lvov, the author of the National
Anthem, " God save the Tsar." It was not until towards
the middle of the century that a genuinely national school
of music took its rise in the work of those three who may
be regarded as the pioneers of modern Russian music. Glinka's
national opera, Life for the Tsar, was produced in 1836 in
St. Petersburg, and had a great and immediate success. But
this was only a brief gleam. Italian opera secured for many
years a monopoly of the St. Petersburg stage, and Glinka's
masterpiece did not secure permanent success until the 'six-
ties, when a new era began for music as for all other forms
242 Russia of the Russians
of public activity. But Glinka did not live to see the brighter
day. His life was a sad and restless one and he had the
disappointments of the pioneer and few of his joys, except
the one inalienable joy of hearing sweet sounds that no
others could hear. When he was a little boy he delighted in
the sound of church bells that came floating in through the
windows of his home in the government of Smolensk. He
conceived a passion for folk-songs, and it was he who later
made the first really successful attempts to embody folk-
melodies in operatic music. He travelled far and wide,
visiting the Caucasus which made a deep and ineffaceable
impression upon him as it did upon his contemporaries, the
poets Pushkin and Lermontov, and spending four years study
in Italy, towards which in the 'thirties the eyes of Russian
artists were constantly turned. Seven months' work in Berlin
gave Glinka a more thorough and intimate knowledge of
musical theory. The comparative failure of his opera, Ruslan
and Ludmila, on its production in St. Petersburg in 1842,
sent the restless composer abroad again. He gave concerts
in Paris with his friend and admirer Berlioz as conductor,
wandered to Spain where he collected folk-songs, and roved
constantly between St. Petersburg, Smolensk, and Paris
until his death in 1857. Like many wanderers he suffered
keenly from home-sickness, and it was his home-sickness
that accentuated his national feelings and impelled him to
write the first Russian national opera and deliberately to
devote himself to the work of establishing a distinctively
Russian style in music.
Glinka exercised on his contemporaries and his immediate
successors an influence that is difficult at the present day to
appreciate. Much of his music retains its
Glinka. attractiveness, though his methods have been
so frequently made use of by others that
they have lost the charm of freshness. Glinka anticipated
Wagner, for instance, in his use of the leit-motiv. Moreover,
Glinka's style is by no means purely Russian, and there are
Music 243
many traces of Italian influence. His Life for the Tsar, based
on the story of how Michael Feodorovich, the founder of the
Romanov dynasty, was saved from pursuing Poles by a
peasant named Ivan Susanin who led the Polish troops astray
in the forest and was killed by them when they discovered
the ruse, has become a standard patriotic opera, and owes
its popularity as much to the familiarity arising from fre-
quent performance as to the real beauties it undoubtedly
possesses. But these beauties are sporadic, and foreigners
find it difficult to share the admiration of many Russians for
the opera as a whole. Much superior to Life for the Tsar as
a work of art is Ruslan and Lndmila, based on a delightful
fantasy of Pushkin's, although it was not until twenty years
after its earliest production that Ruslan and Ludmila secured
that position in the first rank of Russian operas which it
occupies to this day. Glinka composed a number of songs
and instrumental works which are still occasionally per-
formed, but his fame rests mainly on the two operas which
keep fresh the memory of that powerful creative impulse in
which modern Russian music had its birth. He died in
Berlin at the age of fifty-three, disappointed and embittered,
one of the causes that hastened his death being, it is said,
a letter of Rubinstein's in a German newspaper ridiculing
the attempt to found a Russian national school of music.
A monument of a cheerlessly official type has been erected
to his memory near the St. Petersburg Opera House and
Conservatoire in the street that bears his name.
Glinka's contemporary, Dargomyzhsky, is chiefly known as
the author of the still popular opera Rusalka, the subject of
which is drawn from a poetical fragment of 
