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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Russia
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Title: Russia

Author: Donald Mackenzie Wallace

Release date: May 3, 2006 [eBook #1349]
Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1349

Credits: Donald Lainson and David Widger

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUSSIA ***

RUSSIA

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by Donald Mackenzie Wallace

Copyright 1905

CONTENTS

PREFACE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X

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CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII

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CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVII
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CHAPTER XXXIX

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Contents
Preface
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
TRAVELLING IN RUSSIA
Railways—State Interference—River Communications—Russian
"Grand
Tour"—The Volga—Kazan—Zhigulinskiya Gori—Finns and Tartars—
The
Don—Difficulties of Navigation—Discomforts—Rats—Hotels and
Their Peculiar Customs—Roads—Hibernian Phraseology
Explained—Bridges—Posting—A Tarantass—Requisites for
Travelling—Travelling in Winter—Frostbitten—Disagreeable
Episodes—Scene at a Post-Station.
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
IN THE NORTHERN FORESTS
Bird's-eye View of Russia—The Northern Forests—Purpose of
my Journey—Negotiations—The Road—A Village—A Peasant's
House—Vapour-Baths—Curious Custom—Arrival.
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
VOLUNTARY EXILE
Ivanofka—History of the Place—The Steward of the Estate—Slav and
Teutonic Natures—A German's View of the Emancipation—Justices of
the
Peace—New School of Morals—The Russian Language—Linguistic
Talent of
the Russians—My Teacher—A Big Dose of Current History.
CHAPTER IV

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CHAPTER X
CHAPTER X
FINNISH AND TARTAR VILLAGES
A Finnish Tribe—Finnish Villages—Various Stages of
Russification—Finnish Women—Finnish Religions—Method of
"Laying"
Ghosts—Curious Mixture of Christianity and Paganism—Conversion
of
the Finns—A Tartar Village—A Russian Peasant's Conception of
Mahometanism—A Mahometan's View of Christianity—Propaganda
—The
Russian Colonist—Migrations of Peoples During the Dark Ages.
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XI
LORD NOVGOROD THE GREAT
Departure from Ivanofka and Arrival at Novgorod—The Eastern Half
of
the Town—The Kremlin—An Old Legend—The Armed Men of Rus
—The
Northmen—Popular Liberty in Novgorod—The Prince and the
Popular
Assembly—Civil Dissensions and Faction-fights—The Commercial
Republic
Conquered by the Muscovite Tsars—Ivan the Terrible—Present
Condition
of the Town—Provincial Society—Card-playing—Periodicals
—"Eternal
Stillness."
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XII
THE TOWNS AND THE MERCANTILE CLASSES
General Character of Russian Towns—Scarcity of Towns in Russia—
Why
the Urban Element in the Population is so Small—History of
Russian Municipal Institutions—Unsuccessful Efforts to Create a

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Tiers-etat—Merchants, Burghers, and Artisans—Town Council—A
Rich
Merchant—His House—His Love of Ostentation—His Conception of
Aristocracy—Official Decorations—Ignorance and Dishonesty of the
Commercial Classes—Symptoms of Change.
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIII
THE PASTORAL TRIBES OF THE STEPPE
A Journey to the Steppe Region of the Southeast—The Volga—Town
and Province of Samara—Farther Eastward—Appearance of the
Villages—Characteristic Incident—Peasant Mendacity—Explanation
of the
Phenomenon—I Awake in Asia—A Bashkir Aoul—Diner la Tartare—
Kumyss—A
Bashkir Troubadour—Honest Mehemet Zian—Actual Economic
Condition of
the Bashkirs Throws Light on a Well-known Philosophical Theory—
Why
a Pastoral Race Adopts Agriculture—The Genuine Steppe—The
Kirghiz—Letter from Genghis Khan—The Kalmyks—Nogai Tartars—
Struggle
between Nomadic Hordes and Agricultural Colonists.
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XIV
THE MONGOL DOMINATION
The Conquest—Genghis Khan and his People—Creation and Rapid
Disintegration of the Mongol Empire—The Golden Horde—The Real
Character of the Mongol Domination—Religious Toleration—Mongol
System
of Government—Grand Princes—The Princes of Moscow—Influence
of the
Mongol Domination—Practical Importance of the Subject.
CHAPTER XV

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towards
Sectarianism—Two Kinds of Heresy—Probable Future of the
Heretical
Sects—Political Disaffection.
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XVIII
THE DISSENTERS
Dissenters not to be Confounded with Heretics—Extreme Importance
Attached to Ritual Observances—The Raskol, or Great Schism in the
Seventeenth Century—Antichrist Appears!—Policy of Peter the Great
and Catherine II.—Present Ingenious Method of Securing Religious
Toleration—Internal Development of the Raskol—Schism among the
Schismatics—The Old Ritualists—The Priestless People—Cooling of
the
Fanatical Enthusiasm and Formation of New Sects—Recent Policy of
the Government towards the Sectarians—Numerical Force and
Political
Significance of Sectarianism.
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XIX
CHURCH AND STATE
The Russian Orthodox Church—Russia Outside of the Mediaeval
Papal
Commonwealth—Influence of the Greek Church—Ecclesiastical
History of
Russia—Relations between Church and State—Eastern Orthodoxy and
the
Russian National Church—The Synod—Ecclesiastical Grumbling—
Local
Ecclesiastical Administration—The Black Clergy and the Monasteries
—The
Character of the Eastern Church Reflected in the History of Religious
Art—Practical Consequences—The Union Scheme.
CHAPTER XX

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Opinion of Russian Literature, Tchinovniks, and Petits Maitres—His
Supposed and Real Character—An Extreme Radical—Disorders in
the Universities—Administrative Procedure—Russia's Capacity for
Accomplishing Political and Social Evolutions—A Court Dignitary in
his
Country House.
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIII
SOCIAL CLASSES
Do Social Classes or Castes Exist in Russia?—Well-marked Social
Types—Classes Recognised by the Legislation and the Official
Statistics—Origin and Gradual Formation of these Classes—
Peculiarity
in the Historical Development of Russia—Political Life and Political
Parties.
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXIV
THE IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION AND THE OFFICIALS
The Officials in Norgorod Assist Me in My Studies—The Modern
Imperial
Administration Created by Peter the Great, and Developed by his
Successors—A Slavophil's View of the Administration—The
Administration
Briefly Described—The Tchinovniks, or Officials—Official Titles, and
Their Real Significance—What the Administration Has Done for
Russia in
the Past—Its Character Determined by the Peculiar Relation between
the Government and the People—Its Radical Vices—Bureaucratic
Remedies—Complicated Formal Procedure—The Gendarmerie: My
Personal
Relations with this Branch of the Administration; Arrest and Release—
A
Strong, Healthy Public Opinion the Only Effectual Remedy for Bad
Administration.
CHAPTER XXV

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Apathetically Contented—National Humiliation—Popular Discontent
and the Manuscript Literature—Death of Nicholas—Alexander II.—
New
Spirit—Reform Enthusiasm—Change in the Periodical Literature—
The
Kolokol—The Conservatives—The Tchinovniks—First Specific
Proposals—Joint-Stock Companies—The Serf Question Comes to the
Front.
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE SERFS
The Rural Population in Ancient Times—The Peasantry in the
Eighteenth
Century—How Was This Change Effected?—The Common
Explanation
Inaccurate—Serfage the Result of Permanent Economic and Political
Causes—Origin of the Adscriptio Glebae—Its Consequences—Serf
Insurrection—Turning-point in the History of Serfage—Serfage in
Russia and in Western Europe—State Peasants—Numbers and
Geographical
Distribution of the Serf Population—Serf Dues—Legal and Actual
Power
of the Proprietors—The Serfs' Means of Defence—Fugitives—
Domestic
Serfs—Strange Advertisements in the Moscow Gazette—Moral
Influence of
Serfage.
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXIX
THE EMANCIPATION OF THE SERFS
The Question Raised—Chief Committee—The Nobles of the
Lithuanian
Provinces—The Tsar's Broad Hint to the Noblesse—Enthusiasm in the
Press—The Proprietors—Political Aspirations—No Opposition—The
Government—Public Opinion—Fear of the Proletariat—The

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Provincial
Committees—The Elaboration Commission—The Question Ripens—
Provincial
Deputies—Discontent and Demonstrations—The Manifesto—
Fundamental
Principles of the Law—Illusions and Disappointment of the
Serfs—Arbiters of the Peace—A Characteristic Incident—Redemption
—Who
Effected the Emancipation?
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXX
THE LANDED PROPRIETORS SINCE THE EMANCIPATION
Two Opposite Opinions—Difficulties of Investigation—The Problem
Simplified—Direct and Indirect Compensation—The Direct
Compensation
Inadequate—What the Proprietors Have Done with the Remainder of
Their Estates—Immediate Moral Effect of the Abolition of Serfage—
The
Economic Problem—The Ideal Solution and the Difficulty of
Realising
It—More Primitive Arrangements—The Northern Agricultural Zone—
The
Black-earth Zone—The Labour Difficulty—The Impoverishment of
the Noblesse Not a New Phenomenon—Mortgaging of Estates—
Gradual
Expropriation of the Noblesse-Rapid Increase in the Production and
Export of Grain—How Far this Has Benefited the Landed Proprietors.
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXI
THE EMANCIPATED PEASANTRY
The Effects of Liberty—Difficulty of Obtaining Accurate
Information—Pessimist Testimony of the Proprietors—Vague Replies
of
the Peasants—My Conclusions in 1877—Necessity of Revising Them
—My

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Investigations Renewed in 1903—Recent Researches by Native
Political
Economists—Peasant Impoverishment Universally Recognised—
Various
Explanations Suggested—Demoralisation of the Common People—
Peasant
Self-government—Communal System of Land Tenure—Heavy
Taxation—Disruption of Peasant Families—Natural Increase of
Population—Remedies Proposed—Migration—Reclamation of Waste
Land—Land-purchase by Peasantry—Manufacturing Industry—
Improvement of
Agricultural Methods—Indications of Progress.
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXII
THE ZEMSTVO AND THE LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT
Necessity of Reorganising the Provincial Administration—Zemstvo
Created
in 1864—My First Acquaintance with the Institution—District and
Provincial Assemblies—The Leading Members—Great Expectations
Created
by the Institution—These Expectations Not Realised—Suspicions and
Hostility of the Bureaucracy—Zemstvo Brought More Under Control
of the
Centralised Administration—What It Has Really Done—Why It Has
Not
Done More—-Rapid Increase of the Rates—How Far the Expenditure
Is Judicious—Why the Impoverishment of the Peasantry Was
Neglected—Unpractical, Pedantic Spirit—Evil Consequences—
Chinese and
Russian Formalism—Local Self-Government of Russia Contrasted
with That
of England—Zemstvo Better than Its Predecessors—Its Future.
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE NEW LAW COURTS

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Judicial Procedure in the Olden Times—Defects and Abuses—Radical
Reform—The New System—Justices of the Peace and Monthly
Sessions—The
Regular Tribunals—Court of Revision—Modification of the Original
Plan—How Does the System Work?—Rapid Acclimatisation—The
Bench—The
Jury—Acquittal of Criminals Who Confess Their Crimes—Peasants,
Merchants, and Nobles as Jurymen—Independence and Political
Significance of the New Courts.
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXIV
REVOLUTIONARY NIHILISM AND THE REACTION
The Reform-enthusiasm Becomes Unpractical and Culminates in
Nihilism—Nihilism, the Distorted Reflection of Academic Western
Socialism—Russia Well Prepared for Reception of Ultra-Socialist
Virus—Social Reorganisation According to Latest Results of
Science—Positivist Theory—Leniency of Press-censure—Chief
Representatives of New Movement—Government Becomes Alarmed
—Repressive
Measures—Reaction in the Public—The Term Nihilist Invented—The
Nihilist and His Theory—Further Repressive Measures—Attitude of
Landed
Proprietors—Foundation of a Liberal Party—Liberalism Checked by
Polish
Insurrection—Practical Reform Continued—An Attempt at Regicide
Forms
a Turning-point of Government's Policy—Change in Educational
System—Decline of Nihilism.
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXV
SOCIALIST PROPAGANDA, REVOLUTIONARY AGITATION,
AND TERRORISM
Closer Relations with Western Socialism—Attempts to Influence
the Masses—Bakunin and Lavroff—"Going in among the People"—
The

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Missionaries of Revolutionary Socialism—Distinction between
Propaganda
and Agitation—Revolutionary Pamphlets for the Common People—
Aims
and Motives of the Propagandists—Failure of Propaganda—Energetic
Repression—Fruitless Attempts at Agitation—Proposal to Combine
with Liberals—Genesis of Terrorism—My Personal Relations with the
Revolutionists—Shadowers and Shadowed—A Series of Terrorist
Crimes—A
Revolutionist Congress—Unsuccessful Attempts to Assassinate
the Tsar—Ineffectual Attempt at Conciliation by Loris
Melikof—Assassination of Alexander II.—The Executive Committee
Shows Itself Unpractical—Widespread Indignation and Severe
Repression—Temporary Collapse of the Revolutionary Movement—A
New
Revolutionary Movement in Sight.
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVI
INDUSTRIAL PROGRESS AND THE PROLETARIAT
Russia till Lately a Peasant Empire—Early Efforts to Introduce Arts
and
Crafts—Peter the Great and His Successors—Manufacturing Industry
Long Remains an Exotic—The Cotton Industry—The Reforms of
Alexander
II.—Protectionists and Free Trade—Progress under High Tariffs—M.
Witte's Policy—How Capital Was Obtained—Increase of Exports—
Foreign
Firms Cross the Customs Frontier—Rapid Development of Iron
Industry—A
Commercial Crisis—M. Witte's Position Undermined by Agrarians and
Doctrinaires—M. Plehve a Formidable Opponent—His Apprehensions
of
Revolution—Fall of M. Witte—The Industrial Proletariat
CHAPTER XXXVII

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Opposition of
Japan—Negotiations and War—Russia's Imprudence Explained—
Conclusion.
CHAPTER XXXIX
THE PRESENT SITUATION
Reform or Revolution?—Reigns of Alexander II. and Nicholas II.
Compared and Contrasted—The Present Opposition—Various Groups
—The
Constitutionalists—Zemski Sobors—The Young Tsar Dispels
Illusions—Liberal Frondeurs—Plehve's Repressive Policy—
Discontent
Increased by the War—Relaxation and Wavering under Prince
Mirski—Reform Enthusiasm—The Constitutionalists Formulate their
Demands—The Social Democrats—Father Gapon's Demonstration—
The
Socialist-Revolutionaries—The Agrarian Agitators—The
Subject-Nationalities—Numerical Strength of the Various Groups—
All
United on One Point—Their Different Aims—Possible Solutions of
the
Crisis—Difficulties of Introducing Constitutional Regime—A Strong
Man
Wanted—Uncertainty of the Future.

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PREFACE
The first edition of this work, published early in January, 1877, contained
the concentrated results of my studies during an uninterrupted residence of
six years in Russia—from the beginning of 1870 to the end of 1875. Since
that time I have spent in the European and Central Asian provinces, at
different periods, nearly two years more; and in the intervals I have
endeavoured to keep in touch with the progress of events. My observations
thus extend over a period of thirty-five years.
When I began, a few months ago, to prepare for publication the results of
my more recent observations and researches, my intention was to write an
entirely new work under the title of "Russia in the Twentieth Century," but I
soon perceived that it would be impossible to explain clearly the present
state of things without referring constantly to events of the past, and that I
should be obliged to embody in the new work a large portion of the old one.
The portion to be embodied grew rapidly to such proportions that, in the
course of a few weeks, I began to ask myself whether it would not be better
simply to recast and complete my old material. With a view to deciding the
question I prepared a list of the principal changes which had taken place
during the last quarter of a century, and when I had marshalled them in
logical order, I recognised that they were neither so numerous nor so
important as I had supposed. Certainly there had been much progress, but it
had been nearly all on the old lines. Everywhere I perceived continuity and
evolution; nowhere could I discover radical changes and new departures. In
the central and local administration the reactionary policy of the latter half
of Alexander II.'s reign had been steadily maintained; the revolutionary
movement had waxed and waned, but its aims were essentially the same as
of old; the Church had remained in its usual somnolent condition; a grave
agricultural crisis affecting landed proprietors and peasants had begun, but
it was merely a development of a state of things which I had previously
described; the manufacturing industry had made gigantic strides, but they
were all in the direction which the most competent observers had predicted;
in foreign policy the old principles of guiding the natural expansive forces
along the lines of least resistance, seeking to reach warm-water ports, and

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pegging out territorial claims for the future were persistently followed. No
doubt there were pretty clear indications of more radical changes to come,
but these changes must belong to the future, and it is merely with the past
and the present that a writer who has no pretensions to being a prophet has
to deal.
Under these circumstances it seemed to me advisable to adopt a middle
course. Instead of writing an entirely new work I determined to prepare a
much extended and amplified edition of the old one, retaining such
information about the past as seemed to me of permanent value, and at the
same time meeting as far as possible the requirements of those who wish to
know the present condition of the country.
In accordance with this view I have revised, rearranged, and
supplemented the old material in the light of subsequent events, and I have
added five entirely new chapters—three on the revolutionary movement,
which has come into prominence since 1877; one on the industrial progress,
with which the latest phase of the movement is closely connected; and one
on the main lines of the present situation as it appears to me at the moment
of going to press.
During the many years which I have devoted to the study of Russia, I
have received unstinted assistance from many different quarters. Of the
friends who originally facilitated my task, and to whom I expressed my
gratitude in the preface and notes of the early editions, only three survive—
Mme. de Novikoff, M. E. I. Yakushkin, and Dr. Asher. To the numerous
friends who have kindly assisted me in the present edition I must express
my thanks collectively, but there are two who stand out from the group so
prominently that I may be allowed to mention them personally: these are
Prince Alexander Grigorievitch Stcherbatof, who supplied me with
voluminous materials regarding the agrarian question generally and the
present condition of the peasantry in particular, and M. Albert Brockhaus,
who placed at my disposal the gigantic Russian Encyclopaedia recently
published by his firm (Entsiklopeditcheski Slovar, Leipzig and St.
Petersburg, 1890-1904). This monumental work, in forty-one volumes, is an
inexhaustible storehouse of accurate and well-digested information on all
subjects connected with the Russian Empire, and it has often been of great
use to me in matters of detail.

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With regard to the last chapter of this edition I must claim the reader's
indulgence, because the meaning of the title, "the present situation,"
changes from day to day, and I cannot foresee what further changes may
occur before the work reaches the hands of the public.
LONDON, 22nd May, 1905.
RUSSIA

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CHAPTER I
TRAVELLING IN RUSSIA

Railways—State Interference—River Communications—Russian "Grand
Tour"—The Volga—Kazan—Zhigulinskiya Gori—Finns and Tartars—The
Don—Difficulties of Navigation—Discomforts—Rats—Hotels and Their
Peculiar Customs—Roads—Hibernian Phraseology Explained—Bridges—
Posting—A Tarantass—Requisites for Travelling—Travelling in Winter—
Frostbitten—Disagreeable Episodes—Scene at a Post-Station.
Of course travelling in Russia is no longer what it was. During the last
half century a vast network of railways has been constructed, and one can
now travel in a comfortable first-class carriage from Berlin to St. Petersburg
or Moscow, and thence to Odessa, Sebastopol, the Lower Volga, the
Caucasus, Central Asia, or Eastern Siberia. Until the outbreak of the war
there was a train twice a week, with through carriages, from Moscow to
Port Arthur. And it must be admitted that on the main lines the passengers
have not much to complain of. The carriages are decidedly better than in
England, and in winter they are kept warm by small iron stoves, assisted by
double windows and double doors—a very necessary precaution in a land
where the thermometer often descends to 30 degrees below zero. The train
never attains, it is true, a high rate of speed—so at least English and
Americans think—but then we must remember that Russians are rarely in a
hurry, and like to have frequent opportunities of eating and drinking. In
Russia time is not money; if it were, nearly all the subjects of the Tsar
would always have a large stock of ready money on hand, and would often
have great difficulty in spending it. In reality, be it parenthetically
remarked, a Russian with a superabundance of ready money is a
phenomenon rarely met with in real life.
In conveying passengers at the rate of from fifteen to thirty miles an hour,
the railway companies do at least all that they promise; but in one very
important respect they do not always strictly fulfil their engagements. The
traveller takes a ticket for a certain town, and on arriving at what he
imagines to be his destination, he may find merely a railway-station

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surrounded by fields. On making inquiries, he discovers, to his
disappointment, that the station is by no means identical with the town
bearing the same name, and that the railway has fallen several miles short
of fulfilling the bargain, as he understood the terms of the contract. Indeed,
it might almost be said that as a general rule railways in Russia, like camel-
drivers in certain Eastern countries, studiously avoid the towns. This seems
at first a strange fact. It is possible to conceive that the Bedouin is so
enamoured of tent life and nomadic habits that he shuns a town as he would
a man-trap; but surely civil engineers and railway contractors have no such
dread of brick and mortar. The true reason, I suspect, is that land within or
immediately beyond the municipal barrier is relatively dear, and that the
railways, being completely beyond the invigorating influence of healthy
competition, can afford to look upon the comfort and convenience of
passengers as a secondary consideration. Gradually, it is true, this state of
things is being improved by private initiative. As the railways refuse to
come to the towns, the towns are extending towards the railways, and
already some prophets are found bold enough to predict that in the course of
time those long, new, straggling streets, without an inhabited hinterland,
which at present try so severely the springs of the ricketty droshkis, will be
properly paved and kept in decent repair. For my own part, I confess I am a
little sceptical with regard to this prediction, and I can only use a favourite
expression of the Russian peasants—daï Bog! God grant it may be so!
It is but fair to state that in one celebrated instance neither engineers nor
railway contractors were directly to blame. From St. Petersburg to Moscow
the locomotive runs for a distance of 400 miles almost as "the crow" is
supposed to fly, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left. For twelve
weary hours the passenger in the express train looks out on forest and
morass, and rarely catches sight of human habitation. Only once he
perceives in the distance what may be called a town; it is Tver which has
been thus favoured, not because it is a place of importance, but simply
because it happened to be near the bee-line. And why was the railway
constructed in this extraordinary fashion? For the best of all reasons—
because the Tsar so ordered it. When the preliminary survey was being
made, Nicholas I. learned that the officers entrusted with the task—and the
Minister of Ways and Roads in the number—were being influenced more
by personal than technical considerations, and he determined to cut the
Gordian knot in true Imperial style. When the Minister laid before him the

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map with the intention of explaining the proposed route, he took a ruler,
drew a straight line from the one terminus to the other, and remarked in a
tone that precluded all discussion, "You will construct the line so!" And the
line was so constructed—remaining to all future ages, like St. Petersburg
and the Pyramids, a magnificent monument of autocratic power.
Formerly this well-known incident was often cited in whispered
philippics to illustrate the evils of the autocratic form of government.
Imperial whims, it was said, over-ride grave economic considerations. In
recent years, however, a change seems to have taken place in public
opinion, and some people now assert that this so-called Imperial whim was
an act of far-seeing policy. As by far the greater part of the goods and
passengers are carried the whole length of the line, it is well that the line
should be as short as possible, and that branch lines should be constructed
to the towns lying to the right and left. Evidently there is a good deal to be
said in favour of this view.
In the development of the railway system there has been another
disturbing cause, which is not likely to occur to the English mind. In
England, individuals and companies habitually act according to their private
interests, and the State interferes as little as possible; private initiative does
as it pleases, unless the authorities can prove that important bad
consequences will necessarily result. In Russia, the onus probandi lies on
the other side; private initiative is allowed to do nothing until it gives
guarantees against all possible bad consequences. When any great
enterprise is projected, the first question is—"How will this new scheme
affect the interests of the State?" Thus, when the course of a new railway
has to be determined, the military authorities are among the first to be
consulted, and their opinion has a great influence on the ultimate decision.
The natural consequence is that the railway-map of Russia presents to the
eye of the strategist much that is quite unintelligible to the ordinary
observer—a fact that will become apparent even to the uninitiated as soon
as a war breaks out in Eastern Europe. Russia is no longer what she was in
the days of the Crimean War, when troops and stores had to be conveyed
hundreds of miles by the most primitive means of transport. At that time she
had only 750 miles of railway; now she has over 36,000 miles, and every
year new lines are constructed.

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The water-communication has likewise in recent years been greatly
improved. On the principal rivers there are now good steamers.
Unfortunately, the climate puts serious obstructions in the way of
navigation. For nearly half of the year the rivers are covered with ice, and
during a great part of the open season navigation is difficult. When the ice
and snow melt the rivers overflow their banks and lay a great part of the
low-lying country under water, so that many villages can only be
approached in boats; but very soon the flood subsides, and the water falls so
rapidly that by midsummer the larger steamers have great difficulty in
picking their way among the sandbanks. The Neva alone—that queen of
northern rivers—has at all times a plentiful supply of water.
Besides the Neva, the rivers commonly visited by the tourist are the
Volga and the Don, which form part of what may be called the Russian
grand tour. Englishmen who wish to see something more than St.
Petersburg and Moscow generally go by rail to Nizhni-Novgorod, where
they visit the great fair, and then get on board one of the Volga steamers.
For those who have mastered the important fact that Russia is not a country
of fine scenery, the voyage down the river is pleasant enough. The left bank
is as flat as the banks of the Rhine below Cologne, but the right bank is
high, occasionally well wooded, and not devoid of a certain tame
picturesqueness. Early on the second day the steamer reaches Kazan, once
the capital of an independent Tartar khanate, and still containing a
considerable Tartar population. Several metchets (as the Mahometan houses
of prayer are here termed), with their diminutive minarets in the lower part
of the town, show that Islamism still survives, though the khanate was
annexed to Muscovy more than three centuries ago; but the town, as a
whole, has a European rather than an Asiatic character. If any one visits it in
the hope of getting "a glimpse of the East," he will be grievously
disappointed, unless, indeed, he happens to be one of those imaginative
tourists who always discover what they wish to see. And yet it must be
admitted that, of all the towns on the route, Kazan is the most interesting.
Though not Oriental, it has a peculiar character of its own, whilst all the
others—Simbirsk, Samara, Saratof—are as uninteresting as Russian
provincial towns commonly are. The full force and solemnity of that
expression will be explained in the sequel.
Probably about sunrise on the third day something like a range of
mountains will appear on the horizon. It may be well to say at once, to

Page 31

prevent disappointment, that in reality nothing worthy of the name of
mountain is to be found in that part of the country. The nearest mountain-
range in that direction is the Caucasus, which is hundreds of miles distant,
and consequently cannot by any possibility be seen from the deck of a
steamer. The elevations in question are simply a low range of hills, called
the Zhigulinskiya Gori. In Western Europe they would not attract much
attention, but "in the kingdom of the blind," as the French proverb has it,
"the one-eyed man is king"; and in a flat region like Eastern Russia these
hills form a prominent feature. Though they have nothing of Alpine
grandeur, yet their well-wooded slopes, coming down to the water's edge—
especially when covered with the delicate tints of early spring, or the rich
yellow and red of autumnal foliage—leave an impression on the memory
not easily effaced.
On the whole—with all due deference to the opinions of my patriotic
Russian friends—I must say that Volga scenery hardly repays the time,
trouble and expense which a voyage from Nizhni to Tsaritsin demands.
There are some pretty bits here and there, but they are "few and far
between." A glass of the most exquisite wine diluted with a gallon of water
makes a very insipid beverage. The deck of the steamer is generally much
more interesting than the banks of the river. There one meets with curious
travelling companions. The majority of the passengers are probably Russian
peasants, who are always ready to chat freely without demanding a formal
introduction, and to relate—with certain restrictions—to a new
acquaintance the simple story of their lives. Often I have thus whiled away
the weary hours both pleasantly and profitably, and have always been
impressed with the peasant's homely common sense, good-natured
kindliness, half-fatalistic resignation, and strong desire to learn something
about foreign countries. This last peculiarity makes him question as well as
communicate, and his questions, though sometimes apparently childish, are
generally to the point.
Among the passengers are probably also some representatives of the
various Finnish tribes inhabiting this part of the country; they may be
interesting to the ethnologist who loves to study physiognomy, but they are
far less sociable than the Russians. Nature seems to have made them silent
and morose, whilst their conditions of life have made them shy and
distrustful. The Tartar, on the other hand, is almost sure to be a lively and
amusing companion. Most probably he is a peddler or small trader of some

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kind. The bundle on which he reclines contains his stock-in-trade,
composed, perhaps, of cotton printed goods and especially bright-coloured
cotton handkerchiefs. He himself is enveloped in a capacious greasy khalát,
or dressing-gown, and wears a fur cap, though the thermometer may be at
90 degrees in the shade. The roguish twinkle in his small piercing eyes
contrasts strongly with the sombre, stolid expression of the Finnish peasants
sitting near him. He has much to relate about St. Petersburg, Moscow, and
perhaps Astrakhan; but, like a genuine trader, he is very reticent regarding
the mysteries of his own craft. Towards sunset he retires with his
companions to some quiet spot on the deck to recite evening prayers. Here
all the good Mahometans on board assemble and stroke their beards, kneel
on their little strips of carpet and prostrate themselves, all keeping time as if
they were performing some new kind of drill under the eve of a severe drill-
sergeant.
If the voyage is made about the end of September, when the traders are
returning home from the fair at Nizhni-Novgorod, the ethnologist will have
a still better opportunity of study. He will then find not only representatives
of the Finnish and Tartar races, but also Armenians, Circassians, Persians,
Bokhariots, and other Orientals—a motley and picturesque but decidedly
unsavoury cargo.
However great the ethnographical variety on board may be, the traveller
will probably find that four days on the Volga are quite enough for all
practical and aesthetic purposes, and instead of going on to Astrakhan he
will quit the steamer at Tsaritsin. Here he will find a railway of about fifty
miles in length, connecting the Volga and the Don. I say advisedly a
railway, and not a train, because trains on this line are not very frequent.
When I first visited the locality, thirty years ago, there were only two a
week, so that if you inadvertently missed one train you had to wait about
three days for the next. Prudent, nervous people preferred travelling by the
road, for on the railway the strange jolts and mysterious creakings were
very alarming. On the other hand the pace was so slow that running off the
rails would have been merely an amusing episode, and even a collision
could scarcely have been attended with serious consequences. Happily
things are improving, even in this outlying part of the country. Now there is
one train daily, and it goes at a less funereal pace.

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From Kalatch, at the Don end of the line, a steamer starts for Rostoff,
which is situated near the mouth of the river. The navigation of the Don is
much more difficult than that of the Volga. The river is extremely shallow,
and the sand-banks are continually shifting, so that many times in the
course of the day the steamer runs aground. Sometimes she is got off by
simply reversing the engines, but not unfrequently she sticks so fast that the
engines have to be assisted. This is effected in a curious way. The captain
always gives a number of stalwart Cossacks a free passage on condition that
they will give him the assistance he requires; and as soon as the ship sticks
fast he orders them to jump overboard with a stout hawser and haul her off!
The task is not a pleasant one, especially as the poor fellows cannot
afterwards change their clothes; but the order is always obeyed with alacrity
and without grumbling. Cossacks, it would seem, have no personal
acquaintance with colds and rheumatism.
In the most approved manuals of geography the Don figures as one of the
principal European rivers, and its length and breadth give it a right to be
considered as such; but its depth in many parts is ludicrously out of
proportion to its length and breadth. I remember one day seeing the captain
of a large, flat-bottomed steamer slacken speed, to avoid running down a
man on horseback who was attempting to cross his bows in the middle of
the stream. Another day a not less characteristic incident happened. A
Cossack passenger wished to be set down at a place where there was no
pier, and on being informed that there was no means of landing him, coolly
jumped overboard and walked ashore. This simple method of disembarking
cannot, of course, be recommended to those who have no local knowledge
regarding the exact position of sand-banks and deep pools.
Good serviceable fellows are those Cossacks who drag the steamer off
the sand-banks, and are often entertaining companions. Many of them can
relate from their own experience, in plain, unvarnished style, stirring
episodes of irregular warfare, and if they happen to be in a communicative
mood they may divulge a few secrets regarding their simple, primitive
commissariat system. Whether they are confidential or not, the traveller
who knows the language will spend his time more profitably and pleasantly
in chatting with them than in gazing listlessly at the uninteresting country
through which he is passing.

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Unfortunately, these Don steamers carry a large number of free
passengers of another and more objectionable kind, who do not confine
themselves to the deck, but unceremoniously find their way into the cabin,
and prevent thin-skinned travellers from sleeping. I know too little of
natural history to decide whether these agile, bloodthirsty parasites are of
the same species as those which in England assist unofficially the Sanitary
Commissioners by punishing uncleanliness; but I may say that their
function in the system of created things is essentially the same, and they
fulfil it with a zeal and energy beyond all praise. Possessing for my own
part a happy immunity from their indelicate attentions, and being perfectly
innocent of entomological curiosity, I might, had I been alone, have
overlooked their existence, but I was constantly reminded of their presence
by less happily constituted mortals, and the complaints of the sufferers
received a curious official confirmation. On arriving at the end of the
journey I asked permission to spend the night on board, and I noticed that
the captain acceded to my request with more readiness and warmth than I
expected. Next morning the fact was fully explained. When I began to
express my thanks for having been allowed to pass the night in a
comfortable cabin, my host interrupted me with a good-natured laugh, and
assured me that, on the contrary, he was under obligations to me. "You see,"
he said, assuming an air of mock gravity, "I have always on board a large
body of light cavalry, and when I have all this part of the ship to myself
they make a combined attack on me; whereas, when some one is sleeping
close by, they divide their forces!"
On certain steamers on the Sea of Azof the privacy of the sleeping-cabin
is disturbed by still more objectionable intruders; I mean rats. During one
short voyage which I made on board the Kertch, these disagreeable visitors
became so importunate in the lower regions of the vessel that the ladies
obtained permission to sleep in the deck-saloon. After this arrangement had
been made, we unfortunate male passengers received redoubled attention
from our tormentors. Awakened early one morning by the sensation of
something running over me as I lay in my berth, I conceived a method of
retaliation. It seemed to me possible that, in the event of another visit, I
might, by seizing the proper moment, kick the rat up to the ceiling with
such force as to produce concussion of the brain and instant death. Very
soon I had an opportunity of putting my plan into execution. A significant
shaking of the little curtain at the foot of the berth showed that it was being

Page 35

used as a scaling-ladder. I lay perfectly still, quite as much interested in the
sport as if I had been waiting, rifle in hand, for big game. Soon the intruder
peeped into my berth, looked cautiously around him, and then proceeded to
walk stealthily across my feet. In an instant he was shot upwards. First was
heard a sharp knock on the ceiling, and then a dull "thud" on the floor. The
precise extent of the injuries inflicted I never discovered, for the victim had
sufficient strength and presence of mind to effect his escape; and the
gentleman at the other side of the cabin, who had been roused by the noise,
protested against my repeating the experiment, on the ground that, though
he was willing to take his own share of the intruders, he strongly objected to
having other people's rats kicked into his berth.
On such occasions it is of no use to complain to the authorities. When I
met the captain on deck I related to him what had happened, and protested
vigorously against passengers being exposed to such annoyances. After
listening to me patiently, he coolly replied, entirely overlooking my
protestations, "Ah! I did better than that this morning; I allowed my rat to
get under the blanket, and then smothered him!"
Railways and steamboats, even when their arrangements leave much to
be desired, invariably effect a salutary revolution in hotel accommodation;
but this revolution is of necessity gradual. Foreign hotelkeepers must
immigrate and give the example; suitable houses must be built; servants
must be properly trained; and, above all, the native travellers must learn the
usages of civilised society. In Russia this revolution is in progress, but still
far from being complete. The cities where foreigners most do congregate—
St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa—already possess hotels that will bear
comparison with those of Western Europe, and some of the more important
provincial towns can offer very respectable accommodation; but there is
still much to be done before the West-European can travel with comfort
even on the principal routes. Cleanliness, the first and most essential
element of comfort, as we understand the term, is still a rare commodity,
and often cannot be procured at any price.
Even in good hotels, when they are of the genuine Russian type, there are
certain peculiarities which, though not in themselves objectionable, strike a
foreigner as peculiar. Thus, when you alight at such an hotel, you are
expected to examine a considerable number of rooms, and to inquire about
the respective prices. When you have fixed upon a suitable apartment, you

Page 36

will do well, if you wish to practise economy, to propose to the landlord
considerably less than he demands; and you will generally find, if you have
a talent for bargaining, that the rooms may be hired for somewhat less than
the sum first stated. You must be careful, however, to leave no possibility of
doubt as to the terms of the contract. Perhaps you assume that, as in taking a
cab, a horse is always supplied without special stipulation, so in hiring a
bedroom the bargain includes a bed and the necessary appurtenances. Such
an assumption will not always be justified. The landlord may perhaps give
you a bedstead without extra charge, but if he be uncorrupted by foreign
notions, he will certainly not spontaneously supply you with bed-linen,
pillows, blankets, and towels. On the contrary, he will assume that you
carry all these articles with you, and if you do not, you must pay for them.
This ancient custom has produced among Russians of the old school a
kind of fastidiousness to which we are strangers. They strongly dislike
using sheets, blankets, and towels which are in a certain sense public
property, just as we should strongly object to putting on clothes which had
been already worn by other people. And the feeling may be developed in
people not Russian by birth. For my own part, I confess to having been
conscious of a certain disagreeable feeling on returning in this respect to the
usages of so-called civilised Europe.
The inconvenience of carrying about the essential articles of bedroom
furniture is by no means so great as might be supposed. Bedrooms in Russia
are always heated during cold weather, so that one light blanket, which may
be also used as a railway rug, is quite sufficient, whilst sheets, pillow-cases,
and towels take up little space in a portmanteau. The most cumbrous object
is the pillow, for air-cushions, having a disagreeable odour, are not well
suited for the purpose. But Russians are accustomed to this encumbrance. In
former days—as at the present time in those parts of the country where
there are neither railways nor macadamised roads—people travelled in carts
or carriages without springs and in these instruments of torture a huge pile
of cushions or pillows is necessary to avoid contusions and dislocations. On
the railways the jolts and shaking are not deadly enough to require such an
antidote; but, even in unconservative Russia, customs outlive the conditions
that created them; and at every railway-station you may see men and
women carrying about their pillows with them as we carry wraps. A genuine
Russian merchant who loves comfort and respects tradition may travel

Page 37

without a portmanteau, but he considers his pillow as an indispensable
article de voyage.
To return to the old-fashioned hotel. When you have completed the
negotiations with the landlord, you will notice that, unless you have a
servant with you, the waiter prepares to perform the duties of valet de
chambre. Do not be surprised at his officiousness, which seems founded on
the assumption that you are three-fourths paralysed. Formerly, every well-
born Russian had a valet always in attendance, and never dreamed of doing
for himself anything which could by any possibility be done for him. You
notice that there is no bell in the room, and no mechanical means of
communicating with the world below stairs. That is because the attendant is
supposed to be always within call, and it is so much easier to shout than to
get up and ring the bell.
In the good old times all this was quite natural. The well-born Russian
had commonly a superabundance of domestic serfs, and there was no
reason why one or two of them should not accompany their master when his
Honour undertook a journey. An additional person in the tarantass did not
increase the expense, and considerably diminished the little unavoidable
inconveniences of travel. But times have changed. In 1861 the domestic
serfs were emancipated by Imperial ukaz. Free servants demand wages; and
on railways or steamers a single ticket does not include an attendant. The
present generation must therefore get through life with a more modest
supply of valets, and must learn to do with its own hands much that was
formerly performed by serf labour. Still, a gentleman brought up in the old
conditions cannot be expected to dress himself without assistance, and
accordingly the waiter remains in your room to act as valet. Perhaps, too, in
the early morning you may learn in an unpleasant way that other parts of
the old system are not yet extinct. You may hear, for instance, resounding
along the corridors such an order as—"Petrusha! Petrusha! Stakán vodý!"
("Little Peter, little Peter, a glass of water!") shouted in a stentorian voice
that would startle the Seven Sleepers.
When the toilet operations are completed, and you order tea—one always
orders tea in Russia—you will be asked whether you have your own tea and
sugar with you. If you are an experienced traveller you will be able to reply
in the affirmative, for good tea can be bought only in certain well-known
shops, and can rarely be found in hotels. A huge, steaming tea-urn, called a

Page 38

samovar—etymologically, a "self-boiler"—will be brought in, and you will
make your tea according to your taste. The tumbler, you know of course, is
to be used as a cup, and when using it you must be careful not to cauterise
the points of your fingers. If you should happen to have anything eatable or
drinkable in your travelling basket, you need not hesitate to take it out at
once, for the waiter will not feel at all aggrieved or astonished at your doing
nothing "for the good of the house." The twenty or twenty-five kopeks that
you pay for the samovar—teapot, tumbler, saucer, spoon, and slop-basin
being included under the generic term pribor—frees you from all corkage
and similar dues.
These and other remnants of old customs are now rapidly disappearing,
and will, doubtless, in a very few years be things of the past—things to be
picked up in out-of-the-way corners, and chronicled by social archaeology;
but they are still to be found in towns not unknown to Western Europe.
Many of these old customs, and especially the old method of travelling,
may be studied in their pristine purity throughout a great part of the country.
Though railway construction has been pushed forward with great energy
during the last forty years, there are still vast regions where the ancient
solitudes have never been disturbed by the shrill whistle of the locomotive,
and roads have remained in their primitive condition. Even in the central
provinces one may still travel hundreds of miles without ever encountering
anything that recalls the name of Macadam.
If popular rumour is to be trusted, there is somewhere in the Highlands of
Scotland, by the side of a turnpike, a large stone bearing the following
doggerel inscription:
"If you had seen this road before it was made, You'd lift up your hands
and bless General Wade."
Any educated Englishman reading this strange announcement would
naturally remark that the first line of the couplet contains a logical
contradiction, probably of Hibernian origin; but I have often thought,
during my wanderings in Russia, that the expression, if not logically
justifiable, might for the sake of vulgar convenience be legalised by a
Permissive Bill. The truth is that, as a Frenchman might say, "there are
roads and roads"—roads made and roads unmade, roads artificial and roads
natural. Now, in Russia, roads are nearly all of the unmade, natural kind,
and are so conservative in their nature that they have at the present day

Page 39

precisely the same appearance as they had many centuries ago. They have
thus for imaginative minds something of what is called "the charm of
historical association." The only perceptible change that takes place in them
during a series of generations is that the ruts shift their position. When these
become so deep that fore-wheels can no longer fathom them, it becomes
necessary to begin making a new pair of ruts to the right or left of the old
ones; and as the roads are commonly of gigantic breadth, there is no
difficulty in finding a place for the operation. How the old ones get filled up
I cannot explain; but as I have rarely seen in any part of the country, except
perhaps in the immediate vicinity of towns, a human being engaged in road
repairing, I assume that beneficent Nature somehow accomplishes the task
without human assistance, either by means of alluvial deposits, or by some
other cosmical action only known to physical geographers.
On the roads one occasionally encounters bridges; and here, again, I have
discovered in Russia a key to the mysteries of Hibernian phraseology. An
Irish member once declared to the House of Commons that the Church was
"the bridge that separated the two great sections of the Irish people." As
bridges commonly connect rather than separate, the metaphor was received
with roars of laughter. If the honourable members who joined in the
hilarious applause had travelled much in Russia, they would have been
more moderate in their merriment; for in that country, despite the laudable
activity of the modern system of local administration created in the sixties,
bridges often act still as a barrier rather than a connecting link, and to cross
a river by a bridge may still be what is termed in popular phrase "a tempting
of Providence." The cautious driver will generally prefer to take to the
water, if there is a ford within a reasonable distance, though both he and his
human load may be obliged, in order to avoid getting wet feet, to assume
undignified postures that would afford admirable material for the
caricaturist. But this little bit of discomfort, even though the luggage should
be soaked in the process of fording, is as nothing compared to the danger of
crossing by the bridge. As I have no desire to harrow unnecessarily the
feelings of the reader, I refrain from all description of ugly accidents,
ending in bruises and fractures, and shall simply explain in a few words
how a successful passage is effected.
When it is possible to approach the bridge without sinking up to the
knees in mud, it is better to avoid all risks by walking over and waiting for
the vehicle on the other side; and when this is impossible, a preliminary

Page 40

survey is advisable. To your inquiries whether it is safe, your yamstchik
(post-boy) is sure to reply, "Nitchevo!"—a word which, according to the
dictionaries, means "nothing" but which has, in the mouths of the peasantry,
a great variety of meanings, as I may explain at some future time. In the
present case it may be roughly translated. "There is no danger." "Nitchevo,
Barin, proyedem" ("There is no danger, sir; we shall get over"), he repeats.
You may refer to the generally rotten appearance of the structure, and point
in particular to the great holes sufficient to engulf half a post-horse. "Ne
bos', Bog pomozhet" ("Do not fear. God will help"), replies coolly your
phlegmatic Jehu. You may have your doubts as to whether in this irreligious
age Providence will intervene specially for your benefit; but your
yamstchik, who has more faith or fatalism, leaves you little time to solve
the problem. Making hurriedly the sign of the cross, he gathers up his reins,
waves his little whip in the air, and, shouting lustily, urges on his team. The
operation is not wanting in excitement. First there is a short descent; then
the horses plunge wildly through a zone of deep mud; next comes a fearful
jolt, as the vehicle is jerked up on to the first planks; then the transverse
planks, which are but loosely held in their places, rattle and rumble
ominously, as the experienced, sagacious animals pick their way cautiously
and gingerly among the dangerous holes and crevices; lastly, you plunge
with a horrible jolt into a second mud zone, and finally regain terra firma,
conscious of that pleasant sensation which a young officer may be supposed
to feel after his first cavalry charge in real warfare.
Of course here, as elsewhere, familiarity breeds indifference. When you
have successfully crossed without serious accident a few hundred bridges of
this kind you learn to be as cool and fatalistic as your yamstchik.
The reader who has heard of the gigantic reforms that have been
repeatedly imposed on Russia by a paternal Government may naturally be
astonished to learn that the roads are still in such a disgraceful condition.
But for this, as for everything else in the world, there is a good and
sufficient reason. The country is still, comparatively speaking, thinly
populated, and in many regions it is difficult, or practically impossible, to
procure in sufficient quantity stone of any kind, and especially hard stone fit
for road-making. Besides this, when roads are made, the severity of the
climate renders it difficult to keep them in good repair.

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When a long journey has to be undertaken through a region in which
there are no railways, there are several ways in which it may be effected. In
former days, when time was of still less value than at present, many landed
proprietors travelled with their own horses, and carried with them, in one or
more capacious, lumbering vehicles, all that was required for the degree of
civilisation which they had attained; and their requirements were often
considerable. The grand seigneur, for instance, who spent the greater part of
his life amidst the luxury of the court society, naturally took with him all the
portable elements of civilisation. His baggage included, therefore, camp-
beds, table-linen, silver plate, a batterie de cuisine, and a French cook. The
pioneers and part of the commissariat force were sent on in advance, so that
his Excellency found at each halting-place everything prepared for his
arrival. The poor owner of a few dozen serfs dispensed, of course, with the
elaborate commissariat department, and contented himself with such
modest fare as could be packed in the holes and corners of a single
tarantass.
It will be well to explain here, parenthetically, what a tarantass is, for I
shall often have occasion to use the word. It may be briefly defined as a
phaeton without springs. The function of springs is imperfectly fulfilled by
two parallel wooden bars, placed longitudinally, on which is fixed the body
of the vehicle. It is commonly drawn by three horses—a strong, fast trotter
in the shafts, flanked on each side by a light, loosely-attached horse that
goes along at a gallop. The points of the shafts are connected by the duga,
which looks like a gigantic, badly formed horseshoe rising high above the
collar of the trotter. To the top of the duga is attached the bearing-rein, and
underneath the highest part of it is fastened a big bell—in the southern
provinces I found two, and sometimes even three bells—which, when the
country is open and the atmosphere still, may be heard a mile off. The use
of the bell is variously explained. Some say it is in order to frighten the
wolves, and others that it is to avoid collisions on the narrow forest-paths.
But neither of these explanations is entirely satisfactory. It is used chiefly in
summer, when there is no danger of an attack from wolves; and the number
of bells is greater in the south, where there are no forests. Perhaps the
original intention was—I throw out the hint for the benefit of a certain
school of archaeologists—to frighten away evil spirits; and the practice has
been retained partly from unreasoning conservatism, and partly with a view
to lessen the chances of collisions. As the roads are noiselessly soft, and the

Page 42

drivers not always vigilant, the dangers of collision are considerably
diminished by the ceaseless peal.
Altogether, the tarantass is well adapted to the conditions in which it is
used. By the curious way in which the horses are harnessed it recalls the
war-chariot of ancient times. The horse in the shafts is compelled by the
bearing-rein to keep his head high and straight before him—though the
movement of his ears shows plainly that he would very much like to put it
somewhere farther away from the tongue of the bell—but the side horses
gallop freely, turning their heads outwards in classical fashion. I believe that
this position is assumed not from any sympathy on the part of these animals
for the remains of classical art, but rather from the natural desire to keep a
sharp eye on the driver. Every movement of his right hand they watch with
close attention, and as soon as they discover any symptoms indicating an
intention of using the whip they immediately show a desire to quicken the
pace.
Now that the reader has gained some idea of what a tarantass is, we may
return to the modes of travelling through the regions which are not yet
supplied with railways.
However enduring and long-winded horses may be, they must be allowed
sometimes, during a long journey, to rest and feed. Travelling long
distances with one's own horses is therefore necessarily a slow operation,
and is now quite antiquated. People who value their time prefer to make use
of the Imperial Post organisation. On all the principal lines of
communication there are regular post-stations, at from ten to twenty miles
apart, where a certain number of horses and vehicles are kept for the
convenience of travellers. To enjoy the privilege of this arrangement, one
has to apply to the proper authorities for a podorozhnaya—a large sheet of
paper stamped with the Imperial Eagle, and bearing the name of the
recipient, the destination, and the number of horses to be supplied. In
return, a small sum is paid for imaginary road-repairs; the rest of the sum is
paid by instalments at the respective stations.
Armed with this document you go to the post-station and demand the
requisite number of horses. Three is the number generally used, but if you
travel lightly and are indifferent to appearances, you may content yourself
with a pair. The vehicle is a kind of tarantass, but not such as I have just
described. The essentials in both are the same, but those which the Imperial

Page 43

Government provides resemble an enormous cradle on wheels rather than a
phaeton. An armful of hay spread over the bottom of the wooden box is
supposed to play the part of seats and cushions. You are expected to sit
under the arched covering, and extend your legs so that the feet lie beneath
the driver's seat; but it is advisable, unless the rain happens to be coming
down in torrents, to get this covering unshipped, and travel without it.
When used, it painfully curtails the little freedom of movement that you
enjoy, and when you are shot upwards by some obstruction on the road it is
apt to arrest your ascent by giving you a violent blow on the top of the head.
It is to be hoped that you are in no hurry to start, otherwise your patience
may be sorely tried. The horses, when at last produced, may seem to you
the most miserable screws that it was ever your misfortune to behold; but
you had better refrain from expressing your feelings, for if you use violent,
uncomplimentary language, it may turn out that you have been guilty of
gross calumny. I have seen many a team composed of animals which a
third-class London costermonger would have spurned, and in which it was
barely possible to recognise the equine form, do their duty in highly
creditable style, and go along at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour,
under no stronger incentive then the voice of the yamstchik. Indeed, the
capabilities of these lean, slouching, ungainly quadrupeds are often
astounding when they are under the guidance of a man who knows how to
drive them. Though such a man commonly carries a little harmless whip, he
rarely uses it except by waving it horizontally in the air. His incitements are
all oral. He talks to his cattle as he would to animals of his own species—
now encouraging them by tender, caressing epithets, and now launching at
them expressions of indignant scorn. At one moment they are his "little
doves," and at the next they have been transformed into "cursed hounds."
How far they understand and appreciate this curious mixture of endearing
cajolery and contemptuous abuse it is difficult to say, but there is no doubt
that it somehow has upon them a strange and powerful influence.
Any one who undertakes a journey of this kind should possess a well-
knit, muscular frame and good tough sinews, capable of supporting an
unlimited amount of jolting and shaking; at the same time he should be well
inured to all the hardships and discomforts incidental to what is vaguely
termed "roughing it." When he wishes to sleep in a post-station, he will find
nothing softer than a wooden bench, unless he can induce the keeper to put
for him on the floor a bundle of hay, which is perhaps softer, but on the

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whole more disagreeable than the deal board. Sometimes he will not get
even the wooden bench, for in ordinary post-stations there is but one room
for travellers, and the two benches—there are rarely more—may be already
occupied. When he does obtain a bench, and succeeds in falling asleep, he
must not be astonished if he is disturbed once or twice during the night by
people who use the apartment as a waiting-room whilst the post-horses are
being changed. These passers-by may even order a samovar, and drink tea,
chat, laugh, smoke, and make themselves otherwise disagreeable, utterly
regardless of the sleepers. Then there are the other intruders, smaller in size
but equally objectionable, of which I have already spoken when describing
the steamers on the Don. Regarding them I desire to give merely one word
of advice: As you will have abundant occupation in the work of self-
defence, learn to distinguish between belligerents and neutrals, and follow
the simple principle of international law, that neutrals should not be
molested. They may be very ugly, but ugliness does not justify
assassination. If, for instance, you should happen in awaking to notice a few
black or brown beetles running about your pillow, restrain your murderous
hand! If you kill them you commit an act of unnecessary bloodshed; for
though they may playfully scamper around you, they will do you no bodily
harm.
Another requisite for a journey in unfrequented districts is a knowledge
of the language. It is popularly supposed that if you are familiar with
French and German you may travel anywhere in Russia. So far as the great
cities and chief lines of communication are concerned, this may be true, but
beyond that it is a delusion. The Russian has not, any more than the West-
European, received from Nature the gift of tongues. Educated Russians
often speak one or two foreign languages fluently, but the peasants know no
language but their own, and it is with the peasantry that one comes in
contact. And to converse freely with the peasant requires a considerable
familiarity with the language—far more than is required for simply reading
a book. Though there are few provincialisms, and all classes of the people
use the same words—except the words of foreign origin, which are used
only by the upper classes—the peasant always speaks in a more laconic and
more idiomatic way than the educated man.
In the winter months travelling is in some respects pleasanter than in
summer, for snow and frost are great macadamisers. If the snow falls
evenly, there is for some time the most delightful road that can be imagined.

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No jolts, no shaking, but a smooth, gliding motion, like that of a boat in
calm water, and the horses gallop along as if totally unconscious of the
sledge behind them. Unfortunately, this happy state of things does not last
all through the winter. The road soon gets cut up, and deep transverse
furrows (ukhaby) are formed. How these furrows come into existence I
have never been able clearly to comprehend, though I have often heard the
phenomenon explained by men who imagined they understood it. Whatever
the cause and mode of formation may be, certain it is that little hills and
valleys do get formed, and the sledge, as it crosses over them, bobs up and
down like a boat in a chopping sea, with this important difference, that the
boat falls into a yielding liquid, whereas the sledge falls upon a solid
substance, unyielding and unelastic. The shaking and jolting which result
may readily be imagined.
There are other discomforts, too, in winter travelling. So long as the air is
perfectly still, the cold may be very intense without being disagreeable; but
if a strong head wind is blowing, and the thermometer ever so many
degrees below zero, driving in an open sledge is a very disagreeable
operation, and noses may get frostbitten without their owners perceiving the
fact in time to take preventive measures. Then why not take covered sledges
on such occasions? For the simple reason that they are not to be had; and if
they could be procured, it would be well to avoid using them, for they are
apt to produce something very like seasickness. Besides this, when the
sledge gets overturned, it is pleasanter to be shot out on to the clean,
refreshing snow than to be buried ignominiously under a pile of
miscellaneous baggage.
The chief requisite for winter travelling in these icy regions is a plentiful
supply of warm furs. An Englishman is very apt to be imprudent in this
respect, and to trust too much to his natural power of resisting cold. To a
certain extent this confidence is justifiable, for an Englishman often feels
quite comfortable in an ordinary great coat when his Russian friends
consider it necessary to envelop themselves in furs of the warmest kind; but
it may be carried too far, in which case severe punishment is sure to follow,
as I once learned by experience. I may relate the incident as a warning to
others:
One day in mid-winter I started from Novgorod, with the intention of
visiting some friends at a cavalry barracks situated about ten miles from the

Page 46

town. As the sun was shining brightly, and the distance to be traversed was
short, I considered that a light fur and a bashlyk—a cloth hood which
protects the ears—would be quite sufficient to keep out the cold, and
foolishly disregarded the warnings of a Russian friend who happened to call
as I was about to start. Our route lay along the river due northward, right in
the teeth of a strong north wind. A wintry north wind is always and
everywhere a disagreeable enemy to face; let the reader try to imagine what
it is when the Fahrenheit thermometer is at 30 degrees below zero—or
rather let him refrain from such an attempt, for the sensation produced
cannot be imagined by those who have not experienced it. Of course I ought
to have turned back—at least, as soon as a sensation of faintness warned me
that the circulation was being seriously impeded—but I did not wish to
confess my imprudence to the friend who accompanied me. When we had
driven about three-fourths of the way we met a peasant-woman, who
gesticulated violently, and shouted something to us as we passed. I did not
hear what she said, but my friend turned to me and said in an alarming tone
—we had been speaking German—"Mein Gott! Ihre Nase ist abgefroren!"
Now the word "abgefroren," as the reader will understand, seemed to
indicate that my nose was frozen off, so I put up my hand in some alarm to
discover whether I had inadvertently lost the whole or part of the member
referred to. It was still in situ and entire, but as hard and insensible as a bit
of wood.
"You may still save it," said my companion, "if you get out at once and
rub it vigorously with snow."
I got out as directed, but was too faint to do anything vigorously. My fur
cloak flew open, the cold seemed to grasp me in the region of the heart, and
I fell insensible.
How long I remained unconscious I know not. When I awoke I found
myself in a strange room, surrounded by dragoon officers in uniform, and
the first words I heard were, "He is out of danger now, but he will have a
fever."
These words were spoken, as I afterwards discovered, by a very
competent surgeon; but the prophecy was not fulfilled. The promised fever
never came. The only bad consequences were that for some days my right
hand remained stiff, and for a week or two I had to conceal my nose from
public view.

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If this little incident justifies me in drawing a general conclusion, I
should say that exposure to extreme cold is an almost painless form of
death; but that the process of being resuscitated is very painful indeed—so
painful, that the patient may be excused for momentarily regretting that
officious people prevented the temporary insensibility from becoming "the
sleep that knows no waking."
Between the alternate reigns of winter and summer there is always a
short interregnum, during which travelling in Russia by road is almost
impossible. Woe to the ill-fated mortal who has to make a long road-journey
immediately after the winter snow has melted; or, worse still, at the
beginning of winter, when the autumn mud has been petrified by the frost,
and not yet levelled by the snow!
At all seasons the monotony of a journey is pretty sure to be broken by
little unforeseen episodes of a more or less disagreeable kind. An axle
breaks, or a wheel comes off, or there is a difficulty in procuring horses. As
an illustration of the graver episodes which may occur, I shall make here a
quotation from my note-book:
Early in the morning we arrived at Maikop, a small town commanding
the entrance to one of the valleys which run up towards the main range of
the Caucasus. On alighting at the post-station, we at once ordered horses for
the next stage, and received the laconic reply, "There are no horses."
"And when will there be some?"
"To-morrow!"
This last reply we took for a piece of playful exaggeration, and demanded
the book in which, according to law, the departure of horses is duly
inscribed, and from which it is easy to calculate when the first team should
be ready to start. A short calculation proved that we ought to get horses by
four o'clock in the afternoon, so we showed the station-keeper various
documents signed by the Minister of the Interior and other influential
personages, and advised him to avoid all contravention of the postal
regulations.
These documents, which proved that we enjoyed the special protection of
the authorities, had generally been of great service to us in our dealings
with rascally station-keepers; but this station-keeper was not one of the
ordinary type. He was a Cossack, of herculean proportions, with a bullet-
shaped head, short-cropped bristly hair, shaggy eyebrows, an enormous

Page 48

pendent moustache, a defiant air, and a peculiar expression of countenance
which plainly indicated "an ugly customer." Though it was still early in the
day, he had evidently already imbibed a considerable quantity of alcohol,
and his whole demeanour showed clearly enough that he was not of those
who are "pleasant in their liquor." After glancing superciliously at the
documents, as if to intimate he could read them were he so disposed, he
threw them down on the table, and, thrusting his gigantic paws into his
capacious trouser-pockets, remarked slowly and decisively, in something
deeper than a double-bass voice, "You'll have horses to-morrow morning."
Wishing to avoid a quarrel we tried to hire horses in the village, and
when our efforts in that direction proved fruitless, we applied to the head of
the rural police. He came and used all his influence with the refractory
station-keeper, but in vain. Hercules was not in a mood to listen to officials
any more than to ordinary mortals. At last, after considerable trouble to
himself, our friend of the police contrived to find horses for us, and we
contented ourselves with entering an account of the circumstances in the
Complaint Book, but our difficulties were by no means at an end. As soon
as Hercules perceived that we had obtained horses without his assistance,
and that he had thereby lost his opportunity of blackmailing us, he offered
us one of his own teams, and insisted on detaining us until we should cancel
the complaint against him. This we refused to do, and our relations with
him became what is called in diplomatic language "extremement tendues."
Again we had to apply to the police.
My friend mounted guard over the baggage whilst I went to the police
office. I was not long absent, but I found, on my return, that important
events had taken place in the interval. A crowd had collected round the
post-station, and on the steps stood the keeper and his post-boys, declaring
that the traveller inside had attempted to shoot them! I rushed in and soon
perceived, by the smell of gunpowder, that firearms had been used, but
found no trace of casualties. My friend was tramping up and down the little
room, and evidently for the moment there was an armistice.
In a very short time the local authorities had assembled, a candle had
been lit, two armed Cossacks stood as sentries at the door, and the
preliminary investigation had begun. The Chief of Police sat at the table and
wrote rapidly on a sheet of foolscap. The investigation showed that two
shots had been fired from a revolver, and two bullets were found imbedded

Page 49

in the wall. All those who had been present, and some who knew nothing of
the incident except by hearsay, were duly examined. Our opponents always
assumed that my friend had been the assailant, in spite of his protestations
to the contrary, and more than once the words pokyshenie na ubiistvo
(attempt to murder) were pronounced. Things looked very black indeed. We
had the prospect of being detained for days and weeks in the miserable
place, till the insatiable demon of official formality had been propitiated.
And then?
When things were thus at their blackest they suddenly took an
unexpected turn, and the deus ex machinâ appeared precisely at the right
moment, just as if we had all been puppets in a sensation novel. There was
the usual momentary silence, and then, mixed with the sound of an
approaching tarantass, a confused murmur: "There he is! He is coming!"
The "he" thus vaguely and mysteriously indicated turned out to be an
official of the judicial administration, who had reason to visit the village for
an entirely different affair. As soon as he had been told briefly what had
happened he took the matter in hand and showed himself equal to the
occasion. Unlike the majority of Russian officials he disliked lengthy
procedure, and succeeded in making the case quite clear in a very short
time. There had been, he perceived, no attempt to murder or anything of the
kind. The station-keeper and his two post-boys, who had no right to be in
the traveller's room, had entered with threatening mien, and when they
refused to retire peaceably, my friend had fired two shots in order to
frighten them and bring assistance. The falsity of their statement that he had
fired at them as they entered the room was proved by the fact that the
bullets were lodged near the ceiling in the wall farthest away from the door.
I must confess that I was agreeably surprised by this unexpected turn of
affairs. The conclusions arrived at were nothing more than a simple
statement of what had taken place; but I was surprised at the fact that a man
who was at once a lawyer and a Russian official should have been able to
take such a plain, commonsense view of the case.
Before midnight we were once more free men, driving rapidly in the
clear moonlight to the next station, under the escort of a fully-armed
Circassian Cossack; but the idea that we might have been detained for
weeks in that miserable place haunted us like a nightmare.

Page 50

Page 51

CHAPTER II
IN THE NORTHERN FORESTS

Bird's-eye View of Russia—The Northern Forests—Purpose of my
Journey—Negotiations—The Road—A Village—A Peasant's House—
Vapour-Baths—Curious Custom—Arrival.
There are many ways of describing a country that one has visited. The
simplest and most common method is to give a chronological account of the
journey; and this is perhaps the best way when the journey does not extend
over more than a few weeks. But it cannot be conveniently employed in the
case of a residence of many years. Did I adopt it, I should very soon exhaust
the reader's patience. I should have to take him with me to a secluded
village, and make him wait for me till I had learned to speak the language.
Thence he would have to accompany me to a provincial town, and spend
months in a public office, whilst I endeavoured to master the mysteries of
local self-government. After this he would have to spend two years with me
in a big library, where I studied the history and literature of the country. And
so on, and so on. Even my journeys would prove tedious to him, as they
often were to myself, for he would have to drive with me many a score of
weary miles, where even the most zealous diary-writer would find nothing
to record beyond the names of the post-stations.
It will be well for me, then, to avoid the strictly chronological method,
and confine myself to a description of the more striking objects and
incidents that came under my notice. The knowledge which I derived from
books will help me to supply a running commentary on what I happened to
see and hear.
Instead of beginning in the usual way with St. Petersburg, I prefer for
many reasons to leave the description of the capital till some future time,
and plunge at once into the great northern forest region.
If it were possible to get a bird's-eye view of European Russia, the
spectator would perceive that the country is composed of two halves widely
differing from each other in character. The northern half is a land of forest

Page 52

and morass, plentifully supplied with water in the form of rivers, lakes, and
marshes, and broken up by numerous patches of cultivation. The southern
half is, as it were, the other side of the pattern—an immense expanse of
rich, arable land, broken up by occasional patches of sand or forest. The
imaginary undulating line separating those two regions starts from the
western frontier about the 50th parallel of latitude, and runs in a
northeasterly direction till it enters the Ural range at about 56 degrees N.L.
Well do I remember my first experience of travel in the northern region,
and the weeks of voluntary exile which formed the goal of the journey. It
was in the summer of 1870. My reason for undertaking the journey was
this: a few months of life in St. Petersburg had fully convinced me that the
Russian language is one of those things which can only be acquired by
practice, and that even a person of antediluvian longevity might spend all
his life in that city without learning to express himself fluently in the
vernacular—especially if he has the misfortune of being able to speak
English, French, and German. With his friends and associates he speaks
French or English. German serves as a medium of communication with
waiters, shop keepers, and other people of that class. It is only with
isvoshtchiki—the drivers of the little open droshkis which fulfil the
function of cabs—that he is obliged to use the native tongue, and with them
a very limited vocabulary suffices. The ordinal numerals and four short,
easily-acquired expressions—poshól (go on), na právo (to the right), na
lyévo (to the left), and stoi (stop)—are all that is required.
Whilst I was considering how I could get beyond the sphere of West-
European languages, a friend came to my assistance, and suggested that I
should go to his estate in the province of Novgorod, where I should find an
intelligent, amiable parish priest, quite innocent of any linguistic
acquirements. This proposal I at once adopted, and accordingly found
myself one morning at a small station of the Moscow Railway,
endeavouring to explain to a peasant in sheep's clothing that I wished to be
conveyed to Ivanofka, the village where my future teacher lived. At that
time I still spoke Russian in a very fragmentary and confused way—pretty
much as Spanish cows are popularly supposed to speak French. My first
remark therefore being literally interpreted, was—"Ivanofka. Horses. You
can?" The point of interrogation was expressed by a simultaneous raising of
the voice and the eyebrows.

Page 53

"Ivanofka?" cried the peasant, in an interrogatory tone of voice. In
Russia, as in other countries, the peasantry when speaking with strangers
like to repeat questions, apparently for the purpose of gaining time.
"Ivanofka," I replied.
"Now?"
"Now!"
After some reflection the peasant nodded and said something which I did
not understand, but which I assumed to mean that he was open to consider
proposals for transporting me to my destination.
"Roubles. How many?"
To judge by the knitting of the brows and the scratching of the head, I
should say that that question gave occasion to a very abstruse mathematical
calculation. Gradually the look of concentrated attention gave place to an
expression such as children assume when they endeavour to get a parental
decision reversed by means of coaxing. Then came a stream of soft words
which were to me utterly unintelligible.
I must not weary the reader with a detailed account of the succeeding
negotiations, which were conducted with extreme diplomatic caution on
both sides, as if a cession of territory or the payment of a war indemnity had
been the subject of discussion. Three times he drove away and three times
returned. Each time he abated his pretensions, and each time I slightly
increased my offer. At last, when I began to fear that he had finally taken
his departure and had left me to my own devices, he re-entered the room
and took up my baggage, indicating thereby that he agreed to my last offer.
The sum agreed upon would have been, under ordinary circumstances,
more than sufficient, but before proceeding far I discovered that the
circumstances were by no means ordinary, and I began to understand the
pantomimic gesticulation which had puzzled me during the negotiations.
Heavy rain had fallen without interruption for several days, and now the
track on which we were travelling could not, without poetical license, be
described as a road. In some parts it resembled a water-course, in others a
quagmire, and at least during the first half of the journey I was constantly
reminded of that stage in the work of creation when the water was not yet
separated from the dry land. During the few moments when the work of
keeping my balance and preventing my baggage from being lost did not

Page 54

engross all my attention, I speculated on the possibility of inventing a boat-
carriage, to be drawn by some amphibious quadruped. Fortunately our two
lean, wiry little horses did not object to being used as aquatic animals. They
took the water bravely, and plunged through the mud in gallant style. The
telega in which we were seated—a four-wheeled skeleton cart—did not
submit to the ill-treatment so silently. It creaked out its remonstrances and
entreaties, and at the more difficult spots threatened to go to pieces; but its
owner understood its character and capabilities, and paid no attention to its
ominous threats. Once, indeed, a wheel came off, but it was soon fished out
of the mud and replaced, and no further casualty occurred.
The horses did their work so well that when about midday we arrived at a
village, I could not refuse to let them have some rest and refreshment—all
the more as my own thoughts had begun to turn in that direction.
The village, like villages in that part of the country generally, consisted
of two long parallel rows of wooden houses. The road—if a stratum of deep
mud can be called by that name—formed the intervening space. All the
houses turned their gables to the passerby, and some of them had
pretensions to architectural decoration in the form of rude perforated
woodwork. Between the houses, and in a line with them, were great wooden
gates and high wooden fences, separating the courtyards from the road. Into
one of these yards, near the farther end of the village, our horses turned of
their own accord.
"An inn?" I said, in an interrogative tone.
The driver shook his head and said something, in which I detected the
word "friend." Evidently there was no hostelry for man and beast in the
village, and the driver was using a friend's house for the purpose.
The yard was flanked on the one side by an open shed, containing rude
agricultural implements which might throw some light on the agriculture of
the primitive Aryans, and on the other side by the dwelling-house and
stable. Both the house and stable were built of logs, nearly cylindrical in
form, and placed in horizontal tiers.
Two of the strongest of human motives, hunger and curiosity, impelled
me to enter the house at once. Without waiting for an invitation, I went up
to the door—half protected against the winter snows by a small open
portico—and unceremoniously walked in. The first apartment was empty,
but I noticed a low door in the wall to the left, and passing through this,

Page 55

entered the principal room. As the scene was new to me, I noted the
principal objects. In the wall before me were two small square windows
looking out upon the road, and in the corner to the right, nearer to the
ceiling than to the floor, was a little triangular shelf, on which stood a
religious picture. Before the picture hung a curious oil lamp. In the corner
to the left of the door was a gigantic stove, built of brick, and whitewashed.
From the top of the stove to the wall on the right stretched what might be
called an enormous shelf, six or eight feet in breadth. This is the so-called
palati, as I afterwards discovered, and serves as a bed for part of the family.
The furniture consisted of a long wooden bench attached to the wall on the
right, a big, heavy, deal table, and a few wooden stools.
Whilst I was leisurely surveying these objects, I heard a noise on the top
of the stove, and, looking up, perceived a human face, with long hair parted
in the middle, and a full yellow beard. I was considerably astonished by this
apparition, for the air in the room was stifling, and I had some difficulty in
believing that any created being—except perhaps a salamander or a negro
—could exist in such a position. I looked hard to convince myself that I was
not the victim of a delusion. As I stared, the head nodded slowly and
pronounced the customary form of greeting.
I returned the greeting slowly, wondering what was to come next.
"Ill, very ill!" sighed the head.
"I'm not astonished at that," I remarked, in an "aside." "If I were lying on
the stove as you are I should be very ill too."
"Hot, very hot?" I remarked, interrogatively.
"Nitchevo"—that is to say, "not particularly." This remark astonished me
all the more as I noticed that the body to which the head belonged was
enveloped in a sheep-skin!
After living some time in Russia I was no longer surprised by such
incidents, for I soon discovered that the Russian peasant has a marvellous
power of bearing extreme heat as well as extreme cold. When a coachman
takes his master or mistress to the theatre or to a party, he never thinks of
going home and returning at an appointed time. Hour after hour he sits
placidly on the box, and though the cold be of an intensity such as is never
experienced in our temperate climate, he can sleep as tranquilly as the
lazzaroni at midday in Naples. In that respect the Russian peasant seems to
be first-cousin to the polar bear, but, unlike the animals of the Arctic

Page 56

regions, he is not at all incommoded by excessive heat. On the contrary, he
likes it when he can get it, and never omits an opportunity of laying in a
reserve supply of caloric. He even delights in rapid transitions from one
extreme to the other, as is amply proved by a curious custom which
deserves to be recorded.
The reader must know that in the life of the Russian peasantry the weekly
vapour-bath plays a most important part. It has even a certain religious
signification, for no good orthodox peasant would dare to enter a church
after being soiled by certain kinds of pollution without cleansing himself
physically and morally by means of the bath. In the weekly arrangements it
forms the occupation for Saturday afternoon, and care is taken to avoid
thereafter all pollution until after the morning service on Sunday. Many
villages possess a public or communal bath of the most primitive
construction, but in some parts of the country—I am not sure how far the
practice extends—the peasants take their vapour-bath in the household oven
in which the bread is baked! In all cases the operation is pushed to the
extreme limit of human endurance—far beyond the utmost limit that can be
endured by those who have not been accustomed to it from childhood. For
my own part, I only made the experiment once; and when I informed my
attendant that my life was in danger from congestion of the brain, he
laughed outright, and told me that the operation had only begun. Most
astounding of all—and this brings me to the fact which led me into this
digression—the peasants in winter often rush out of the bath and roll
themselves in the snow! This aptly illustrates a common Russian proverb,
which says that what is health to the Russian is death to the German.
Cold water, as well as hot vapour, is sometimes used as a means of
purification. In the villages the old pagan habit of masquerading in absurd
costumes at certain seasons—as is done during the carnival in Roman
Catholic countries with the approval, or at least connivance, of the Church
—still survives; but it is regarded as not altogether sinless. He who uses
such disguises places himself to a certain extent under the influence of the
Evil One, thereby putting his soul in jeopardy; and to free himself from this
danger he has to purify himself in the following way: When the annual mid-
winter ceremony of blessing the waters is performed, by breaking a hole in
the ice and immersing a cross with certain religious rites, he should plunge
into the hole as soon as possible after the ceremony. I remember once at
Yaroslavl, on the Volga, two young peasants successfully accomplished this

Page 57

feat—though the police have orders to prevent it—and escaped, apparently
without evil consequences, though the Fahrenheit thermometer was below
zero. How far the custom has really a purifying influence, is a question
which must be left to theologians; but even an ordinary mortal can
understand that, if it be regarded as a penance, it must have a certain
deterrent effect. The man who foresees the necessity of undergoing this
severe penance will think twice before putting on a disguise. So at least it
must have been in the good old times; but in these degenerate days—among
the Russian peasantry as elsewhere—the fear of the Devil, which was
formerly, if not the beginning, at least one of the essential elements, of
wisdom, has greatly decreased. Many a young peasant will now
thoughtlessly disguise himself, and when the consecration of the water is
performed, will stand and look on passively like an ordinary spectator! It
would seem that the Devil, like his enemy the Pope, is destined to lose
gradually his temporal power.
But all this time I am neglecting my new acquaintance on the top of the
stove. In reality I did not neglect him, but listened most attentively to every
word of the long tale that he recited. What it was all about I could only
vaguely guess, for I did not understand more than ten per cent of the words
used, but I assumed from the tone and gestures that he was relating to me
all the incidents and symptoms of his illness. And a very severe illness it
must have been, for it requires a very considerable amount of physical
suffering to make the patient Russian peasant groan. Before he had finished
his tale a woman entered, apparently his wife.
To her I explained that I had a strong desire to eat and drink, and that I
wished to know what she would give me. By a good deal of laborious
explanation I was made to understand that I could have eggs, black bread,
and milk, and we agreed that there should be a division of labour: my
hostess should prepare the samovar for boiling water, whilst I should fry the
eggs to my own satisfaction.
In a few minutes the repast was ready, and, though not very delicate, was
highly acceptable. The tea and sugar I had of course brought with me; the
eggs were not very highly flavoured; and the black rye-bread, strongly
intermixed with sand, could be eaten by a peculiar and easily-acquired
method of mastication, in which the upper molars are never allowed to

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touch those of the lower jaw. In this way the grating of the sand between the
teeth is avoided.
Eggs, black bread, milk, and tea—these formed my ordinary articles of
food during all my wanderings in Northern Russia. Occasionally potatoes
could be got, and afforded the possibility of varying the bill of fare. The
favourite materials employed in the native cookery are sour cabbage,
cucumbers, and kvass—a kind of very small beer made from black bread.
None of these can be recommended to the traveller who is not already
accustomed to them.
The remainder of the journey was accomplished at a rather more rapid
pace than the preceding part, for the road was decidedly better, though it
was traversed by numerous half-buried roots, which produced violent jolts.
From the conversation of the driver I gathered that wolves, bears, and elks
were found in the forest through which we were passing.
The sun had long since set when we reached our destination, and I found
to my dismay that the priest's house was closed for the night. To rouse the
reverend personage from his slumbers, and endeavour to explain to him
with my limited vocabulary the object of my visit, was not to be thought of.
On the other hand, there was no inn of any kind in the vicinity. When I
consulted the driver as to what was to be done, he meditated for a little, and
then pointed to a large house at some distance where there were still lights.
It turned out to be the country-house of the gentleman who had advised me
to undertake the journey, and here, after a short explanation, though the
owner was not at home, I was hospitably received.
It had been my intention to live in the priest's house, but a short interview
with him on the following day convinced me that that part of my plan could
not be carried out. The preliminary objections that I should find but poor
fare in his humble household, and much more of the same kind, were at
once put aside by my assurance, made partly by pantomime, that, as an old
traveller, I was well accustomed to simple fare, and could always
accommodate myself to the habits of people among whom my lot happened
to be cast. But there was a more serious difficulty. The priest's family had,
as is generally the case with priests' families, been rapidly increasing during
the last few years, and his house had not been growing with equal rapidity.
The natural consequence of this was that he had not a room or a bed to
spare. The little room which he had formerly kept for occasional visitors

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was now occupied by his eldest daughter, who had returned from a "school
for the daughters of the clergy," where she had been for the last two years.
Under these circumstances, I was constrained to accept the kind proposal
made to me by the representative of my absent friend, that I should take up
my quarters in one of the numerous unoccupied rooms in the manor-house.
This arrangement, I was reminded, would not at all interfere with my
proposed studies, for the priest lived close at hand, and I might spend with
him as much time as I liked.
And now let me introduce the reader to my reverend teacher and one or
two other personages whose acquaintance I made during my voluntary
exile.

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CHAPTER III
VOLUNTARY EXILE

Ivanofka—History of the Place—The Steward of the Estate—Slav and
Teutonic Natures—A German's View of the Emancipation—Justices of the
Peace—New School of Morals—The Russian Language—Linguistic Talent
of the Russians—My Teacher—A Big Dose of Current History.
This village, Ivanofka by name, in which I proposed to spend some
months, was rather more picturesque than villages in these northern forests
commonly are. The peasants' huts, built on both sides of a straight road,
were colourless enough, and the big church, with its five pear-shaped
cupolas rising out of the bright green roof and its ugly belfry in the
Renaissance style, was not by any means beautiful in itself; but when seen
from a little distance, especially in the soft evening twilight, the whole
might have been made the subject of a very pleasing picture. From the point
that a landscape-painter would naturally have chosen, the foreground was
formed by a meadow, through which flowed sluggishly a meandering
stream. On a bit of rising ground to the right, and half concealed by an
intervening cluster of old rich-coloured pines, stood the manor-house—a
big, box-shaped, whitewashed building, with a verandah in front,
overlooking a small plot that might some day become a flower-garden. To
the left of this stood the village, the houses grouping prettily with the big
church, and a little farther in this direction was an avenue of graceful
birches. On the extreme left were fields, bounded by a dark border of fir-
trees. Could the spectator have raised himself a few hundred feet from the
ground, he would have seen that there were fields beyond the village, and
that the whole of this agricultural oasis was imbedded in a forest stretching
in all directions as far as the eye could reach.
The history of the place may be told in a few words. In former times the
estate, including the village and all its inhabitants, had belonged to a
monastery, but when, in 1764, the Church lands were secularised by
Catherine, it became the property of the State. Some years afterwards the
Empress granted it, with the serfs and everything else which it contained, to

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an old general who had distinguished himself in the Turkish wars. From that
time it had remained in the K—— family. Some time between the years
1820 and 1840 the big church and the mansion-house had been built by the
actual possessor's father, who loved country life, and devoted a large part of
his time and energies to the management of his estate. His son, on the
contrary, preferred St. Petersburg to the country, served in one of the public
offices, loved passionately French plays and other products of urban
civilisation, and left the entire management of the property to a German
steward, popularly known as Karl Karl'itch, whom I shall introduce to the
reader presently.
The village annals contained no important events, except bad harvests,
cattle-plagues, and destructive fires, with which the inhabitants seem to
have been periodically visited from time immemorial. If good harvests were
ever experienced, they must have faded from the popular recollection. Then
there were certain ancient traditions which might have been lessened in
bulk and improved in quality by being subjected to searching historical
criticism. More than once, for instance, a leshie, or wood-sprite, had been
seen in the neighbourhood; and in several households the domovoi, or
brownie, had been known to play strange pranks until he was properly
propitiated. And as a set-off against these manifestations of evil powers,
there were well-authenticated stories about a miracle-working image that
had mysteriously appeared on the branch of a tree, and about numerous
miraculous cures that had been effected by means of pilgrimages to holy
shrines.
But it is time to introduce the principal personages of this little
community. Of these, by far the most important was Karl Karl'itch, the
steward.
First of all I ought, perhaps, to explain how Karl Schmidt, the son of a
well-to-do Bauer in the Prussian village of Schonhausen, became Karl
Karl'itch, the principal personage in the Russian village of Ivanofka.
About the time of the Crimean War many of the Russian landed
proprietors had become alive to the necessity of improving the primitive,
traditional methods of agriculture, and sought for this purpose German
stewards for their estates. Among these proprietors was the owner of
Ivanofka. Through the medium of a friend in Berlin he succeeded in
engaging for a moderate salary a young man who had just finished his

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studies in one of the German schools of agriculture—the institution at
Hohenheim, if my memory does not deceive me. This young man had
arrived in Russia as plain Karl Schmidt, but his name was soon transformed
into Karl Karl'itch, not from any desire of his own, but in accordance with a
curious Russian custom. In Russia one usually calls a man not by his family
name, but by his Christian name and patronymic—the latter being formed
from the name of his father. Thus, if a man's name is Nicholas, and his
father's Christian name is—or was—Ivan, you address him as Nikolai
Ivanovitch (pronounced Ivan'itch); and if this man should happen to have a
sister called Mary, you will address her—even though she should be
married—as Marya Ivanovna (pronounced Ivanna).
Immediately on his arrival young Schmidt had set himself vigorously to
reorganise the estate and improve the method of agriculture. Some ploughs,
harrows, and other implements which had been imported at a former period
were dragged out of the obscurity in which they had lain for several years,
and an attempt was made to farm on scientific principles. The attempt was
far from being completely successful, for the serfs—this was before the
Emancipation—could not be made to work like regularly trained German
labourers. In spite of all admonitions, threats, and punishments, they
persisted in working slowly, listlessly, inaccurately, and occasionally they
broke the new instruments from carelessness or some more culpable
motive. Karl Karl'itch was not naturally a hard-hearted man, but he was
very rigid in his notions of duty, and could be cruelly severe when his
orders were not executed with an accuracy and punctuality that seemed to
the Russian rustic mind mere useless pedantry. The serfs did not offer him
any open opposition, and were always obsequiously respectful in their
demeanour towards him, but they invariably frustrated his plans by their
carelessness and stolid, passive resistance.
Thus arose that silent conflict and that smouldering mutual enmity which
almost always result from the contact of the Teuton with the Slav. The serfs
instinctively regretted the good old times, when they lived under the rough-
and-ready patriarchal rule of their masters, assisted by a native "burmister,"
or overseer, who was one of themselves. The burmister had not always been
honest in his dealings with them, and the master had often, when in anger,
ordered severe punishments to be inflicted; but the burmister had not
attempted to make them change their old habits, and had shut his eyes to
many little sins of omission and commission, whilst the master was always

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ready to assist them in difficulties, and commonly treated them in a kindly,
familiar way. As the old Russian proverb has it, "Where danger is, there too
is kindly forgiveness." Karl Karl'itch, on the contrary, was the
personification of uncompassionate, inflexible law. Blind rage and
compassionate kindliness were alike foreign to his system of government. If
he had any feeling towards the serfs, it was one of chronic contempt. The
word durak (blockhead) was constantly on his lips, and when any bit of
work was well done, he took it as a matter of course, and never thought of
giving a word of approval or encouragement.
When it became evident, in 1859, that the emancipation of the serfs was
at hand, Karl Karl'itch confidently predicted that the country would
inevitably go to ruin. He knew by experience that the peasants were lazy
and improvident, even when they lived under the tutelage of a master, and
with the fear of the rod before their eyes. What would they become when
this guidance and salutary restraint should be removed? The prospect raised
terrible forebodings in the mind of the worthy steward, who had his
employer's interests really at heart; and these forebodings were considerably
increased and intensified when he learned that the peasants were to receive
by law the land which they occupied on sufferance, and which comprised
about a half of the whole arable land of the estate. This arrangement he
declared to be a dangerous and unjustifiable infraction of the sacred rights
of property, which savoured strongly of communism, and could have but
one practical result: the emancipated peasants would live by the cultivation
of their own land, and would not consent on any terms to work for their
former master.
In the few months which immediately followed the publication of the
Emancipation Edict in 1861, Karl Karl'itch found much to confirm his most
gloomy apprehensions. The peasants showed themselves dissatisfied with
the privileges conferred upon them, and sought to evade the corresponding
duties imposed on them by the new law. In vain he endeavoured, by
exhortations, promises, and threats, to get the most necessary part of the
field-work done, and showed the peasants the provision of the law
enjoining them to obey and work as of old until some new arrangement
should be made. To all his appeals they replied that, having been freed by
the Tsar, they were no longer obliged to work for their former master; and
he was at last forced to appeal to the authorities. This step had a certain

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effect, but the field-work was executed that year even worse than usual, and
the harvest suffered in consequence.
Since that time things had gradually improved. The peasants had
discovered that they could not support themselves and pay their taxes from
the land ceded to them, and had accordingly consented to till the
proprietor's fields for a moderate recompense. "These last two years," said
Karl Karl'itch to me, with an air of honest self-satisfaction, "I have been
able, after paying all expenses, to transmit little sums to the young master in
St. Petersburg. It was certainly not much, but it shows that things are better
than they were. Still, it is hard, uphill work. The peasants have not been
improved by liberty. They now work less and drink more than they did in
the times of serfage, and if you say a word to them they'll go away, and not
work for you at all." Here Karl Karl'itch indemnified himself for his recent
self-control in the presence of his workers by using a series of the strongest
epithets which the combined languages of his native and of his adopted
country could supply. "But laziness and drunkenness are not their only
faults. They let their cattle wander into our fields, and never lose an
opportunity of stealing firewood from the forest."
"But you have now for such matters the rural justices of the peace," I
ventured to suggest.
"The justices of the peace!" . . . Here Karl Karl'itch used an inelegant
expression, which showed plainly that he was no unqualified admirer of the
new judicial institutions. "What is the use of applying to the justices? The
nearest one lives six miles off, and when I go to him he evidently tries to
make me lose as much time as possible. I am sure to lose nearly a whole
day, and at the end of it I may find that I have got nothing for my pains.
These justices always try to find some excuse for the peasant, and when
they do condemn, by way of exception, the affair does not end there. There
is pretty sure to be a pettifogging practitioner prowling about—some
rascally scribe who has been dismissed from the public offices for pilfering
and extorting too openly—and he is always ready to whisper to the peasant
that he should appeal. The peasant knows that the decision is just, but he is
easily persuaded that by appealing to the Monthly Sessions he gets another
chance in the lottery, and may perhaps draw a prize. He lets the rascally
scribe, therefore, prepare an appeal for him, and I receive an invitation to
attend the Session of Justices in the district town on a certain day.

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"It is a good five-and-thirty miles to the district town, as you know, but I
get up early, and arrive at eleven o'clock, the hour stated in the official
notice. A crowd of peasants are hanging about the door of the court, but the
only official present is the porter. I enquire of him when my case is likely to
come on, and receive the laconic answer, 'How should I know?' After half
an hour the secretary arrives. I repeat my question, and receive the same
answer. Another half hour passes, and one of the justices drives up in his
tarantass. Perhaps he is a glib-tongued gentleman, and assures me that the
proceedings will commence at once: 'Sei tchas! sei tchas!' Don't believe
what the priest or the dictionary tells you about the meaning of that
expression. The dictionary will tell you that it means 'immediately,' but
that's all nonsense. In the mouth of a Russian it means 'in an hour,' 'next
week,' 'in a year or two,' 'never'—most commonly 'never.' Like many other
words in Russian, 'sei tchas' can be understood only after long experience.
A second justice drives up, and then a third. No more are required by law,
but these gentlemen must first smoke several cigarettes and discuss all the
local news before they begin work.
"At last they take their seats on the bench—a slightly elevated platform at
one end of the room, behind a table covered with green baize—and the
proceedings commence. My case is sure to be pretty far down on the list—
the secretary takes, I believe, a malicious pleasure in watching my
impatience—and before it is called the justices have to retire at least once
for refreshments and cigarettes. I have to amuse myself by listening to the
other cases, and some of them, I can assure you, are amusing enough. The
walls of that room must be by this time pretty well saturated with perjury,
and many of the witnesses catch at once the infection. Perhaps I may tell
you some other time a few of the amusing incidents that I have seen there.
At last my case is called. It is as clear as daylight, but the rascally
pettifogger is there with a long-prepared speech, he holds in his hand a
small volume of the codified law, and quotes paragraphs which no amount
of human ingenuity can make to bear upon the subject. Perhaps the previous
decision is confirmed; perhaps it is reversed; in either case, I have lost a
second day and exhausted more patience than I can conveniently spare. And
something even worse may happen, as I know by experience. Once during a
case of mine there was some little informality—someone inadvertently
opened the door of the consulting-room when the decision was being
written, or some other little incident of the sort occurred, and the rascally

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pettifogger complained to the Supreme Court of Revision, which is a part of
the Senate. The case was all about a few roubles, but it was discussed in St.
Petersburg, and afterwards tried over again by another court of justices.
Now I have paid my Lehrgeld, and go no more to law."
"Then you must expose yourself to all kinds of extortion?"
"Not so much as you might imagine. I have my own way of dispensing
justice. When I catch a peasant's horse or cow in our fields, I lock it up and
make the owner pay a ransom."
"Is it not rather dangerous," I inquired, "to take the law thus into your
own hands? I have heard that the Russian justices are extremely severe
against any one who has recourse to what our German jurists call
Selbsthulfe."
"That they are! So long as you are in Russia, you had much better let
yourself be quietly robbed than use any violence against the robber. It is
less trouble, and it is cheaper in the long run. If you do not, you may
unexpectedly find yourself some fine morning in prison! You must know
that many of the young justices belong to the new school of morals."
"What is that? I have not heard of any new discoveries lately in the
sphere of speculative ethics."
"Well, to tell you the truth, I am not one of the initiated, and I can only
tell you what I hear. So far as I have noticed, the representatives of the new
doctrine talk chiefly about Gumannost' and Tchelovetcheskoe dostoinstvo.
You know what these words mean?"
"Humanity, or rather humanitarianism and human dignity," I replied, not
sorry to give a proof that I was advancing in my studies.
"There, again, you allow your dictionary and your priest to mislead you.
These terms, when used by a Russian, cover much more than we understand
by them, and those who use them most frequently have generally a special
tenderness for all kinds of malefactors. In the old times, malefactors were
popularly believed to be bad, dangerous people; but it has been lately
discovered that this is a delusion. A young proprietor who lives not far off
assures me that they are the true Protestants, and the most powerful social
reformers! They protest practically against those imperfections of social
organisation of which they are the involuntary victims. The feeble,
characterless man quietly submits to his chains; the bold, generous, strong

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man breaks his fetters, and helps others to do the same. A very ingenious
defence of all kinds of rascality, isn't it?"
"Well, it is a theory that might certainly be carried too far, and might
easily lead to very inconvenient conclusions; but I am not sure that,
theoretically speaking, it does not contain a certain element of truth. It
ought at least to foster that charity which we are enjoined to practise
towards all men. But perhaps 'all men' does not include publicans and
sinners?"
On hearing these words Karl Karl'itch turned to me, and every feature of
his honest German face expressed the most undisguised astonishment. "Are
you, too, a Nihilist?" he inquired, as soon as he had partially recovered his
breath.
"I really don't know what a Nihilist is, but I may assure you that I am not
an 'ist' of any kind. What is a Nihilist?"
"If you live long in Russia you'll learn that without my telling you. As I
was saying, I am not at all afraid of the peasants citing me before the
justice. They know better now. If they gave me too much trouble I could
starve their cattle."
"Yes, when you catch them in your fields," I remarked, taking no notice
of the abrupt turn which he had given to the conversation.
"I can do it without that. You must know that, by the Emancipation Law,
the peasants received arable land, but they received little or no pasturage. I
have the whip hand of them there!"
The remarks of Karl Karl'itch on men and things were to me always
interesting, for he was a shrewd observer, and displayed occasionally a
pleasant, dry humour. But I very soon discovered that his opinions were not
to be accepted without reserve. His strong, inflexible Teutonic nature often
prevented him from judging impartially. He had no sympathy with the men
and the institutions around him, and consequently he was unable to see
things from the inside. The specks and blemishes on the surface he
perceived clearly enough, but he had no knowledge of the secret, deep-
rooted causes by which these specks and blemishes were produced. The
simple fact that a man was a Russian satisfactorily accounted, in his
opinion, for any kind of moral deformity; and his knowledge turned out to
be by no means so extensive as I had at first supposed. Though he had been
many years in the country, he knew very little about the life of the peasants

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beyond that small part of it which concerned directly his own interests and
those of his employer. Of the communal organisation, domestic life,
religious beliefs, ceremonial practices, and nomadic habits of his humble
neighbours, he knew little, and the little he happened to know was far from
accurate. In order to gain a knowledge of these matters it would be better, I
perceived, to consult the priest, or, better still, the peasants themselves. But
to do this it would be necessary to understand easily and speak fluently the
colloquial language, and I was still very far from having, acquired the
requisite proficiency.
Even for one who possesses a natural facility for acquiring foreign
tongues, the learning of Russian is by no means an easy task. Though it is
essentially an Aryan language like our own, and contains only a slight
intermixture of Tartar words,—such as bashlyk (a hood), kalpak (a night-
cap), arbuz (a water-melon), etc.—it has certain sounds unknown to West-
European ears, and difficult for West-European tongues, and its roots,
though in great part derived from the same original stock as those of the
Graeco-Latin and Teutonic languages, are generally not at all easily
recognised. As an illustration of this, take the Russian word otets. Strange
as it may at first sight appear, this word is merely another form of our word
father, of the German vater, and of the French pere. The syllable ets is the
ordinary Russian termination denoting the agent, corresponding to the
English and German ending er, as we see in such words as—kup-ets (a
buyer), plov-ets (a swimmer), and many others. The root ot is a mutilated
form of vot, as we see in the word otchina (a paternal inheritance), which is
frequently written votchina. Now vot is evidently the same root as the
German vat in Vater, and the English fath in father. Quod erat
demonstrandum.
All this is simple enough, and goes to prove the fundamental identity, or
rather the community of origin, of the Slav and Teutonic languages; but it
will be readily understood that etymological analogies so carefully
disguised are of little practical use in helping us to acquire a foreign tongue.
Besides this, the grammatical forms and constructions in Russian are very
peculiar, and present a great many strange irregularities. As an illustration
of this we may take the future tense. The Russian verb has commonly a
simple and a frequentative future. The latter is always regularly formed by
means of an auxiliary with the infinitive, as in English, but the former is
constructed in a variety of ways, for which no rule can be given, so that the

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simple future of each individual verb must be learned by a pure effort of
memory. In many verbs it is formed by prefixing a preposition, but it is
impossible to determine by rule which preposition should be used. Thus idu
(I go) becomes poidu; pishu (I write) becomes napishu; pyu (I drink)
becomes vuipyu, and so on.
Closely akin to the difficulties of pronunciation is the difficulty of
accentuating the proper syllable. In this respect Russian is like Greek; you
can rarely tell a priori on what syllable the accent falls. But it is more
puzzling than Greek, for two reasons: firstly, it is not customary to print
Russian with accents; and secondly, no one has yet been able to lay down
precise rules for the transposition of the accent in the various inflections of
the same word, Of this latter peculiarity, let one illustration suffice. The
word ruka (hand) has the accent on the last syllable, but in the accusative
(ruku) the accent goes back to the first syllable. It must not, however, be
assumed that in all words of this type a similar transposition takes place.
The word beda (misfortune), for instance, as well as very many others,
always retains the accent on the last syllable.
These and many similar difficulties, which need not be here enumerated,
can be mastered only by long practice. Serious as they are, they need not
frighten any one who is in the habit of learning foreign tongues. The ear and
the tongue gradually become familiar with the peculiarities of inflection and
accentuation, and practice fulfils the same function as abstract rules.
It is commonly supposed that Russians have been endowed by Nature
with a peculiar linguistic talent. Their own language, it is said, is so difficult
that they have no difficulty in acquiring others. This common belief
requires, as it seems to me, some explanation. That highly educated
Russians are better linguists than the educated classes of Western Europe
there can be no possible doubt, for they almost always speak French, and
often English and German also. The question, however, is whether this is
the result of a psychological peculiarity, or of other causes. Now, without
venturing to deny the existence of a natural faculty, I should say that the
other causes have at least exercised a powerful influence. Any Russian who
wishes to be regarded as civilised must possess at least one foreign
language; and, as a consequence of this, the children of the upper classes
are always taught at least French in their infancy. Many households
comprise a German nurse, a French tutor, and an English governess; and the

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children thus become accustomed from their earliest years to the use of
these three languages. Besides this, Russian is phonetically very rich and
contains nearly all the sounds which are to be found in West-European
tongues. Perhaps on the whole it would be well to apply here the Darwinian
theory, and suppose that the Russian Noblesse, having been obliged for
several generations to acquire foreign languages, have gradually developed
a hereditary polyglot talent.
Several circumstances concurred to assist me in my efforts, during my
voluntary exile, to acquire at least such a knowledge of the language as
would enable me to converse freely with the peasantry. In the first place,
my reverend teacher was an agreeable, kindly, talkative man, who took a
great delight in telling interminable stories, quite independently of any
satisfaction which he might derive from the consciousness of their being
understood and appreciated. Even when walking alone he was always
muttering something to an imaginary listener. A stranger meeting him on
such occasions might have supposed that he was holding converse with
unseen spirits, though his broad muscular form and rubicund face militated
strongly against such a supposition; but no man, woman, or child living
within a radius of ten miles would ever have fallen into this mistake. Every
one in the neighbourhood knew that "Batushka" (papa), as he was familiarly
called, was too prosaical, practical a man to see things ethereal, that he was
an irrepressible talker, and that when he could not conveniently find an
audience he created one by his own imagination. This peculiarity of his
rendered me good service. Though for some time I understood very little of
what he said, and very often misplaced the positive and negative
monosyllables which I hazarded occasionally by way of encouragement, he
talked vigorously all the same. Like all garrulous people, he was constantly
repeating himself; but to this I did not object, for the custom—however
disagreeable in ordinary society—was for me highly beneficial, and when I
had already heard a story once or twice before, it was much easier for me to
assume at the proper moment the requisite expression of countenance.
Another fortunate circumstance was that at Ivanofka there were no
distractions, so that the whole of the day and a great part of the night could
be devoted to study. My chief amusement was an occasional walk in the
fields with Karl Karl'itch; and even this mild form of dissipation could not
always be obtained, for as soon as rain had fallen it was difficult to go
beyond the verandah—the mud precluding the possibility of a

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constitutional. The nearest approach to excitement was mushroom-
gathering; and in this occupation my inability to distinguish the edible from
the poisonous species made my efforts unacceptable. We lived so "far from
the madding crowd" that its din scarcely reached our ears. A week or ten
days might pass without our receiving any intelligence from the outer
world. The nearest post-office was in the district town, and with that distant
point we had no regular system of communication. Letters and newspapers
remained there till called for, and were brought to us intermittently when
some one of our neighbours happened to pass that way. Current history was
thus administered to us in big doses.
One very big dose I remember well. For a much longer time than usual
no volunteer letter-carrier had appeared, and the delay was more than
usually tantalising, because it was known that war had broken out between
France and Germany. At last a big bundle of a daily paper called the Golos
was brought to me. Impatient to learn whether any great battle had been
fought, I began by examining the latest number, and stumbled at once on an
article headed, "Latest Intelligence: the Emperor at Wilhelmshohe!!!" The
large type in which the heading was printed and the three marks of
exclamation showed plainly that the article was very important. I began to
read with avidity, but was utterly mystified. What emperor was this?
Probably the Tsar or the Emperor of Austria, for there was no German
Emperor in those days. But no! It was evidently the Emperor of the French.
And how did Napoleon get to Wilhelmshohe? The French must have broken
through the Rhine defences, and pushed far into Germany. But no! As I read
further, I found this theory equally untenable. It turned out that the Emperor
was surrounded by Germans, and—a prisoner! In order to solve the
mystery, I had to go back to the preceding numbers of the paper, and
learned, at a sitting, all about the successive German victories, the defeat
and capitulation of Macmahon's army at Sedan, and the other great events
of that momentous time. The impression produced can scarcely be realised
by those who have always imbibed current history in the homeopathic doses
administered by the morning and evening daily papers.
By the useful loquacity of my teacher and the possibility of devoting all
my time to my linguistic studies, I made such rapid progress in the
acquisition of the language that I was able after a few weeks to understand
much of what was said to me, and to express myself in a vague, roundabout
way. In the latter operation I was much assisted by a peculiar faculty of

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divination which the Russians possess in a high degree. If a foreigner
succeeds in expressing about one-fourth of an idea, the Russian peasant can
generally fill up the remaining three-fourths from his own intuition.
As my powers of comprehension increased, my long conversations with
the priest became more and more instructive. At first his remarks and stories
had for me simply a philological interest, but gradually I perceived that his
talk contained a great deal of solid, curious information regarding himself
and the class to which he belonged—information of a kind not commonly
found in grammatical exercises. Some of this I now propose to
communicate to the reader.

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Page 74

CHAPTER IV
THE VILLAGE PRIEST

Priests' Names—Clerical Marriages—The White and the Black Clergy—
Why the People do not Respect the Parish Priests—History of the White
Clergy—The Parish Priest and the Protestant Pastor—In What Sense the
Russian People are Religious—Icons—The Clergy and Popular Education
—Ecclesiastical Reform—Premonitory Symptoms of Change—Two
Typical Specimens of the Parochial Clergy of the Present Day.
In formal introductions it is customary to pronounce in a more or less
inaudible voice the names of the two persons introduced. Circumstances
compel me in the present case to depart from received custom. The truth is,
I do not know the names of the two people whom I wish to bring together!
The reader who knows his own name will readily pardon one-half of my
ignorance, but he may naturally expect that I should know the name of a
man with whom I profess to be acquainted, and with whom I daily held
long conversations during a period of several months. Strange as it may
seem, I do not. During all the time of my sojourn in Ivanofka I never heard
him addressed or spoken of otherwise than as "Batushka." Now "Batushka"
is not a name at all. It is simply the diminutive form of an obsolete word
meaning "father," and is usually applied to all village priests. The ushka is a
common diminutive termination, and the root Bat is evidently the same as
that which appears in the Latin pater.
Though I do not happen to know what Batushka's family name was, I can
communicate two curious facts concerning it: he had not possessed it in his
childhood, and it was not the same as his father's.
The reader whose intuitive powers have been preternaturally sharpened
by a long course of sensation novels will probably leap to the conclusion
that Batushka was a mysterious individual, very different from what he
seemed—either the illegitimate son of some great personage, or a man of
high birth who had committed some great sin, and who now sought oblivion
and expiation in the humble duties of a parish priest. Let me dispel at once
all delusions of this kind. Batushka was actually as well as legally the

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legitimate son of an ordinary parish priest, who was still living, about
twenty miles off, and for many generations all his paternal and maternal
ancestors, male and female, had belonged to the priestly caste. He was thus
a Levite of the purest water, and thoroughly Levitical in his character.
Though he knew by experience something about the weakness of the flesh,
he had never committed any sins of the heroic kind, and had no reason to
conceal his origin. The curious facts above stated were simply the result of
a peculiar custom which exists among the Russian clergy. According to this
custom, when a boy enters the seminary he receives from the Bishop a new
family name. The name may be Bogoslafski, from a word signifying
"Theology," or Bogolubof, "the love of God," or some similar term; or it
may be derived from the name of the boy's native village, or from any other
word which the Bishop thinks fit to choose. I know of one instance where a
Bishop chose two French words for the purpose. He had intended to call the
boy Velikoselski, after his native place, Velikoe Selo, which means "big
village"; but finding that there was already a Velikoselski in the seminary,
and being in a facetious frame of mind, he called the new comer
Grandvillageski—a word that may perhaps sorely puzzle some philologist
of the future.
My reverend teacher was a tall, muscular man of about forty years of age,
with a full dark-brown beard, and long lank hair falling over his shoulders.
The visible parts of his dress consisted of three articles—a dingy-brown
robe of coarse material buttoned closely at the neck and descending to the
ground, a wideawake hat, and a pair of large, heavy boots. As to the esoteric
parts of his attire, I refrained from making investigations. His life had been
an uneventful one. At an early age he had been sent to the seminary in the
chief town of the province, and had made for himself the reputation of a
good average scholar. "The seminary of that time," he used to say to me,
referring to that part of his life, "was not what it is now. Nowadays the
teachers talk about humanitarianism, and the boys would think that a crime
had been committed against human dignity if one of them happened to be
flogged. But they don't consider that human dignity is at all affected by
their getting drunk, and going to—to—to places that I never went to. I was
flogged often enough, and I don't think that I am a worse man on that
account; and though I never heard then anything about pedagogical science
that they talk so much about now, I'll read a bit of Latin yet with the best of
them.

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"When my studies were finished," said Batushka, continuing the simple
story of his life, "the Bishop found a wife for me, and I succeeded her
father, who was then an old man. In that way I became a priest of Ivanofka,
and have remained here ever since. It is a hard life, for the parish is big, and
my bit of land is not very fertile; but, praise be to God! I am healthy and
strong, and get on well enough."
"You said that the Bishop found a wife for you," I remarked. "I suppose,
therefore, that he was a great friend of yours."
"Not at all. The Bishop does the same for all the seminarists who wish to
be ordained: it is an important part of his pastoral duties."
"Indeed!" I exclaimed in astonishment. "Surely that is carrying the
system of paternal government a little too far. Why should his Reverence
meddle with things that don't concern him?"
"But these matters do concern him. He is the natural protector of widows
and orphans, especially among the clergy of his own diocese. When a parish
priest dies, what is to become of his wife and daughters?"
Not perceiving clearly the exact bearing of these last remarks, I ventured
to suggest that priests ought to economise in view of future contingencies.
"It is easy to speak," replied Batushka: "'A story is soon told,' as the old
proverb has it, 'but a thing is not soon done.' How are we to economise?
Even without saving we have the greatest difficulty to make the two ends
meet."
"Then the widow and daughters might work and gain a livelihood."
"What, pray, could they work at?" asked Batushka, and paused for a
reply. Seeing that I had none to offer him, he continued, "Even the house
and land belong not to them, but to the new priest."
"If that position occurred in a novel," I said, "I could foretell what would
happen. The author would make the new priest fall in love with and marry
one of the daughters, and then the whole family, including the mother-in-
law, would live happily ever afterwards."
"That is exactly how the Bishop arranges the matter. What the novelist
does with the puppets of his imagination, the Bishop does with real beings
of flesh and blood. As a rational being he cannot leave things to chance.
Besides this, he must arrange the matter before the young man takes orders,
because, by the rules of the Church, the marriage cannot take place after the

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ceremony of ordination. When the affair is arranged before the charge
becomes vacant, the old priest can die with the pleasant consciousness that
his family is provided for."
"Well, Batushka, you certainly put the matter in a very plausible way, but
there seem to be two flaws in the analogy. The novelist can make two
people fall in love with each other, and make them live happily together
with the mother-in-law, but that—with all due respect to his Reverence, be
it said—is beyond the power of a Bishop."
"I am not sure," said Batushka, avoiding the point of the objection, "that
love-marriages are always the happiest ones; and as to the mother-in-law,
there are—or at least there were until the emancipation of the serfs—a
mother-in-law and several daughters-in-law in almost every peasant
household."
"And does harmony generally reign in peasant households?"
"That depends upon the head of the house. If he is a man of the right sort,
he can keep the women-folks in order." This remark was made in an
energetic tone, with the evident intention of assuring me that the speaker
was himself "a man of the right sort"; but I did not attribute much
importance to it, for I have occasionally heard henpecked husbands talk in
this grandiloquent way when their wives were out of hearing. Altogether I
was by no means convinced that the system of providing for the widows
and orphans of the clergy by means of mariages de convenance was a good
one, but I determined to suspend my judgment until I should obtain fuller
information.
An additional bit of evidence came to me a week or two later. One
morning, on going into the priest's house, I found that he had a friend with
him—the priest of a village some fifteen miles off. Before we had got
through the ordinary conventional remarks about the weather and the crops,
a peasant drove up to the door in his cart with a message that an old peasant
was dying in a neighbouring village, and desired the last consolations of
religion. Batushka was thus obliged to leave us, and his friend and I agreed
to stroll leisurely in the direction of the village to which he was going, so as
to meet him on his way home. The harvest was already finished, so that our
road, after emerging from the village, lay through stubble-fields. Beyond
this we entered the pine forest, and by the time we had reached this point I

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had succeeded in leading the conversation to the subject of clerical
marriages.
"I have been thinking a good deal on this subject," I said, "and I should
very much like to know your opinion about the system."
My new acquaintance was a tall, lean, black-haired man, with a sallow
complexion and vinegar aspect—evidently one of those unhappy mortals
who are intended by Nature to take a pessimistic view of all things, and to
point out to their fellows the deep shadows of human life. I was not at all
surprised, therefore, when he replied in a deep, decided tone, "Bad, very
bad—utterly bad!"
The way in which these words were pronounced left no doubt as to the
opinion of the speaker, but I was desirous of knowing on what that opinion
was founded—more especially as I seemed to detect in the tone a note of
personal grievance. My answer was shaped accordingly.
"I suspected that; but in the discussions which I have had I have always
been placed at a disadvantage, not being able to adduce any definite facts in
support of my opinion."
"You may congratulate yourself on being unable to find any in your own
experience. A mother-in-law living in the house does not conduce to
domestic harmony. I don't know how it is in your country, but so it is with
us."
I hastened to assure him that this was not a peculiarity of Russia.
"I know it only too well," he continued. "My mother-in-law lived with
me for some years, and I was obliged at last to insist on her going to another
son-in-law."
"Rather selfish conduct towards your brother-in-law," I said to myself,
and then added audibly, "I hope you have thus solved the difficulty
satisfactorily."
"Not at all. Things are worse now than they were. I agreed to pay her
three roubles a month, and have regularly fulfilled my promise, but lately
she has thought it not enough, and she made a complaint to the Bishop. Last
week I went to him to defend myself, but as I had not money enough for all
the officials in the Consistorium, I could not obtain justice. My mother-in-
law had made all sorts of absurd accusations against me, and consequently I
was laid under an inhibition for six weeks!"

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"And what is the effect of an inhibition?"
"The effect is that I cannot perform the ordinary rites of our religion. It is
really very unjust," he added, assuming an indignant tone, "and very
annoying. Think of all the hardship and inconvenience to which it gives
rise."
As I thought of the hardship and inconvenience to which the parishioners
must be exposed through the inconsiderate conduct of the old mother-in-
law, I could not but sympathise with my new acquaintance's indignation.
My sympathy was, however, somewhat cooled when I perceived that I was
on a wrong tack, and that the priest was looking at the matter from an
entirely different point of view.
"You see," he said, "it is a most unfortunate time of year. The peasants
have gathered in their harvest, and can give of their abundance. There are
merry-makings and marriages, besides the ordinary deaths and baptisms.
Altogether I shall lose by the thing more than a hundred roubles!"
I confess I was a little shocked on hearing the priest thus speak of his
sacred functions as if they were an ordinary marketable commodity, and
talk of the inhibition as a pushing undertaker might talk of sanitary
improvements. My surprise was caused not by the fact that he regarded the
matter from a pecuniary point of view—for I was old enough to know that
clerical human nature is not altogether insensible to pecuniary
considerations—but by the fact that he should thus undisguisedly express
his opinions to a stranger without in the least suspecting that there was
anything unseemly in his way of speaking. The incident appeared to me
very characteristic, but I refrained from all audible comments, lest I should
inadvertently check his communicativeness. With the view of encouraging
it, I professed to be very much interested, as I really was, in what he said,
and I asked him how in his opinion the present unsatisfactory state of things
might be remedied.
"There is but one cure," he said, with a readiness that showed he had
often spoken on the theme already, "and that is freedom and publicity. We
full-grown men are treated like children, and watched like conspirators. If I
wish to preach a sermon—not that I often wish to do such a thing, but there
are occasions when it is advisable—I am expected to show it first to the
Blagotchinny, and—"
"I beg your pardon, who is the Blagotchinny?"

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"The Blagotchinny is a parish priest who is in direct relations with the
Consistory of the Province, and who is supposed to exercise a strict
supervision over all the other parish priests of his district. He acts as the spy
of the Consistory, which is filled with greedy, shameless officials, deaf to
any one who does not come provided with a handful of roubles. The Bishop
may be a good, well-intentioned man, but he always sees and acts through
these worthless subordinates. Besides this, the Bishops and heads of
monasteries, who monopolise the higher places in the ecclesiastical
Administration, all belong to the Black Clergy—that is to say, they are all
monks—and consequently cannot understand our wants. How can they, on
whom celibacy is imposed by the rules of the Church, understand the
position of a parish priest who has to bring up a family and to struggle with
domestic cares of every kind? What they do is to take all the comfortable
places for themselves, and leave us all the hard work. The monasteries are
rich enough, and you see how poor we are. Perhaps you have heard that the
parish priests extort money from the peasants—refusing to perform the rites
of baptism or burial until a considerable sum has been paid. It is only too
true, but who is to blame? The priest must live and bring up his family, and
you cannot imagine the humiliations to which he has to submit in order to
gain a scanty pittance. I know it by experience. When I make the periodical
visitation I can see that the peasants grudge every handful of rye and every
egg that they give me. I can overbear their sneers as I go away, and I know
they have many sayings such as—'The priest takes from the living and from
the dead.' Many of them fasten their doors, pretending to be away from
home, and do not even take the precaution of keeping silent till I am out of
hearing."
"You surprise me," I said, in reply to the last part of this long tirade; "I
have always heard that the Russians are a very religious people—at least
the lower classes."
"So they are; but the peasantry are poor and heavily taxed. They set great
importance on the sacraments, and observe rigorously the fasts, which
comprise nearly a half of the year; but they show very little respect for their
priests, who are almost as poor as themselves."
"But I do not see clearly how you propose to remedy this state of things."
"By freedom and publicity, as I said before." The worthy man seemed to
have learned this formula by rote. "First of all, our wants must be made

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known. In some provinces there have been attempts to do this by means of
provincial assemblies of the clergy, but these efforts have always been
strenuously opposed by the Consistories, whose members fear publicity
above all things. But in order to have publicity we must have more
freedom."
Here followed a long discourse on freedom and publicity, which seemed
to me very confused. So far as I could understand the argument, there was a
good deal of reasoning in a circle. Freedom was necessary in order to get
publicity, and publicity was necessary in order to get freedom; and the
practical result would be that the clergy would enjoy bigger salaries and
more popular respect. We had only got thus far in the investigation of the
subject when our conversation was interrupted by the rumbling of a
peasant's cart. In a few seconds our friend Batushka appeared, and the
conversation took a different turn.
Since that time I have frequently spoken on this subject with competent
authorities, and nearly all have admitted that the present condition of the
clergy is highly unsatisfactory, and that the parish priest rarely enjoys the
respect of his parishioners. In a semi-official report, which I once
accidentally stumbled upon when searching for material of a different kind,
the facts are stated in the following plain language: "The people"—I seek to
translate as literally as possible—"do not respect the clergy, but persecute
them with derision and reproaches, and feel them to be a burden. In nearly
all the popular comic stories the priest, his wife, or his labourer is held up to
ridicule, and in all the proverbs and popular sayings where the clergy are
mentioned it is always with derision. The people shun the clergy, and have
recourse to them not from the inner impulse of conscience, but from
necessity. . . . And why do the people not respect the clergy? Because it
forms a class apart; because, having received a false kind of education, it
does not introduce into the life of the people the teaching of the Spirit, but
remains in the mere dead forms of outward ceremonial, at the same time
despising these forms even to blasphemy; because the clergy itself
continually presents examples of want of respect to religion, and transforms
the service of God into a profitable trade. Can the people respect the clergy
when they hear how one priest stole money from below the pillow of a
dying man at the moment of confession, how another was publicly dragged
out of a house of ill-fame, how a third christened a dog, how a fourth whilst
officiating at the Easter service was dragged by the hair from the altar by

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the deacon? Is it possible for the people to respect priests who spend their
time in the gin-shop, write fraudulent petitions, fight with the cross in their
hands, and abuse each other in bad language at the altar?
"One might fill several pages with examples of this kind—in each
instance naming the time and place—without overstepping the boundaries
of the province of Nizhni-Novgorod. Is it possible for the people to respect
the clergy when they see everywhere amongst them simony, carelessness in
performing the religious rites, and disorder in administering the
sacraments? Is it possible for the people to respect the clergy when they see
that truth has disappeared from it, and that the Consistories, guided in their
decisions not by rules, but by personal friendship and bribery, destroy in it
the last remains of truthfulness? If we add to all this the false certificates
which the clergy give to those who do not wish to partake of the Eucharist,
the dues illegally extracted from the Old Ritualists, the conversion of the
altar into a source of revenue, the giving of churches to priests' daughters as
a dowry, and similar phenomena, the question as to whether the people can
respect the clergy requires no answer."
As these words were written by an orthodox Russian,* celebrated for his
extensive and intimate knowledge of Russian provincial life, and were
addressed in all seriousness to a member of the Imperial family, we may
safely assume that they contain a considerable amount of truth. The reader
must not, however, imagine that all Russian priests are of the kind above
referred to. Many of them are honest, respectable, well-intentioned men,
who conscientiously fulfil their humble duties, and strive hard to procure a
good education for their children. If they have less learning, culture, and
refinement than the Roman Catholic priesthood, they have at the same time
infinitely less fanaticism, less spiritual pride, and less intolerance towards
the adherents of other faiths.

* Mr. Melnikof, in a "secret" Report to the Grand Duke
Constantine Nikolaievitch.

Both the good and the bad qualities of the Russian priesthood at the
present time can be easily explained by its past history, and by certain
peculiarities of the national character.
The Russian White Clergy—that is to say, the parish priests, as
distinguished from the monks, who are called the Black Clergy—have had a
curious history. In primitive times they were drawn from all classes of the

Page 83

population, and freely elected by the parishioners. When a man was elected
by the popular vote, he was presented to the Bishop, and if he was found to
be a fit and proper person for the office, he was at once ordained. But this
custom early fell into disuse. The Bishops, finding that many of the
candidates presented were illiterate peasants, gradually assumed the right of
appointing the priests, with or without the consent of the parishioners; and
their choice generally fell on the sons of the clergy as the men best fitted to
take orders. The creation of Bishops' schools, afterwards called seminaries,
in which the sons of the clergy were educated, naturally led, in the course of
time, to the total exclusion of the other classes. The policy of the civil
Government led to the same end. Peter the Great laid down the principle
that every subject should in some way serve the State—the nobles as
officers in the army or navy, or as officials in the civil service; the clergy as
ministers of religion; and the lower classes as soldiers, sailors, or tax-
payers. Of these three classes the clergy had by far the lightest burdens, and
consequently many nobles and peasants would willingly have entered its
ranks. But this species of desertion the Government could not tolerate, and
accordingly the priesthood was surrounded by a legal barrier which
prevented all outsiders from entering it. Thus by the combined efforts of the
ecclesiastical and the civil Administration the clergy became a separate
class or caste, legally and actually incapable of mingling with the other
classes of the population.
The simple fact that the clergy became an exclusive caste, with a peculiar
character, peculiar habits, and peculiar ideals, would in itself have had a
prejudicial influence on the priesthood; but this was not all. The caste
increased in numbers by the process of natural reproduction much more
rapidly than the offices to be filled, so that the supply of priests and deacons
soon far exceeded the demand; and the disproportion between supply and
demand became every year greater and greater. In this way was formed an
ever-increasing clerical Proletariat, which—as is always the case with a
Proletariat of any kind—gravitated towards the towns. In vain the
Government issued ukazes prohibiting the priests from quitting their places
of domicile, and treated as vagrants and runaways those who disregarded
the prohibition; in vain successive sovereigns endeavoured to diminish the
number of these supernumeraries by drafting them wholesale into the army.
In Moscow, St. Petersburg, and all the larger towns the cry was, "Still they
come!" Every morning, in the Kremlin of Moscow, a large crowd of them

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assembled for the purpose of being hired to officiate in the private chapels
of the rich nobles, and a great deal of hard bargaining took place between
the priests and the lackeys sent to hire them—conducted in the same spirit,
and in nearly the same forms, as that which simultaneously took place in
the bazaar close by between extortionate traders and thrifty housewives.
"Listen to me," a priest would say, as an ultimatum, to a lackey who was
trying to beat down the price: "if you don't give me seventy-five kopeks
without further ado, I'll take a bite of this roll, and that will be an end to it!"
And that would have been an end to the bargaining, for, according to the
rules of the Church, a priest cannot officiate after breaking his fast. The
ultimatum, however, could be used with effect only to country servants who
had recently come to town. A sharp lackey, experienced in this kind of
diplomacy, would have laughed at the threat, and replied coolly, "Bite away,
Batushka; I can find plenty more of your sort!" Amusing scenes of this kind
I have heard described by old people who professed to have been eye-
witnesses.
The condition of the priests who remained in the villages was not much
better. Those of them who were fortunate enough to find places were raised
at least above the fear of absolute destitution, but their position was by no
means enviable. They received little consideration or respect from the
peasantry, and still less from the nobles. When the church was situated not
on the State Domains, but on a private estate, they were practically under
the power of the proprietor—almost as completely as his serfs; and
sometimes that power was exercised in a most humiliating and shameful
way. I have heard, for instance, of one priest who was ducked in a pond on
a cold winter day for the amusement of the proprietor and his guests—
choice spirits, of rough, jovial temperament; and of another who, having
neglected to take off his hat as he passed the proprietor's house, was put into
a barrel and rolled down a hill into the river at the bottom!
In citing these incidents, I do not at all mean to imply that they represent
the relations which usually existed between proprietors and village priests,
for I am quite aware that wanton cruelty was not among the ordinary vices
of Russian serf-owners. My object in mentioning the incidents is to show
how a brutal proprietor—and it must be admitted that they were not a few
brutal individuals in the class—could maltreat a priest without much danger
of being called to account for his conduct. Of course such conduct was an
offence in the eyes of the criminal law; but the criminal law of that time

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was very shortsighted, and strongly disposed to close its eyes completely
when the offender was an influential proprietor. Had the incidents reached
the ears of the Emperor Nicholas he would probably have ordered the
culprit to be summarily and severely punished but, as the Russian proverb
has it, "Heaven is high, and the Tsar is far off." A village priest treated in
this barbarous way could have little hope of redress, and, if he were a
prudent man, he would make no attempt to obtain it; for any annoyance
which he might give the proprietor by complaining to the ecclesiastical
authorities would be sure to be paid back to him with interest in some
indirect way.
The sons of the clergy who did not succeed in finding regular sacerdotal
employment were in a still worse position. Many of them served as scribes
or subordinate officials in the public offices, where they commonly eked
out their scanty salaries by unblushing extortion and pilfering. Those who
did not succeed in gaining even modest employment of this kind had to
keep off starvation by less lawful means, and not unfrequently found their
way into the prisons or to Siberia.
In judging of the Russian priesthood of the present time, we must call to
mind this severe school through which it has passed, and we must also take
into consideration the spirit which has been for centuries predominant in the
Eastern Church—I mean the strong tendency both in the clergy and in the
laity to attribute an inordinate importance to the ceremonial element of
religion. Primitive mankind is everywhere and always disposed to regard
religion as simply a mass of mysterious rites which have a secret magical
power of averting evil in this world and securing felicity in the next. To this
general rule the Russian peasantry are no exception, and the Russian
Church has not done all it might have done to eradicate this conception and
to bring religion into closer association with ordinary morality. Hence such
incidents as the following are still possible: A robber kills and rifles a
traveller, but he refrains from eating a piece of cooked meat which he finds
in the cart, because it happens to be a fast-day; a peasant prepares to rob a
young attache of the Austrian Embassy in St. Petersburg, and ultimately
kills his victim, but before going to the house he enters a church and
commends his undertaking to the protection of the saints; a housebreaker,
when in the act of robbing a church, finds it difficult to extract the jewels
from an Icon, and makes a vow that if a certain saint assists him he will
place a rouble's-worth of tapers before the saint's image! These facts are

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within the memory of the present generation. I knew the young attache, and
saw him a few days before his death.
All these are of course extreme cases, but they illustrate a tendency
which in its milder forms is only too general amongst the Russian people—
the tendency to regard religion as a mass of ceremonies which have a
magical rather than a spiritual significance. The poor woman who kneels at
a religious procession in order that the Icon may be carried over her head,
and the rich merchant who invites the priests to bring some famous Icon to
his house, illustrates this tendency in a more harmless form.
According to a popular saying, "As is the priest, so is the parish," and the
converse proposition is equally true—as is the parish, so is the priest. The
great majority of priests, like the great majority of men in general, content
themselves with simply striving to perform what is expected of them, and
their character is consequently determined to a certain extent by the ideas
and conceptions of their parishioners. This will become more apparent if we
contrast the Russian priest with the Protestant pastor.
According to Protestant conceptions, the village pastor is a man of grave
demeanour and exemplary conduct, and possesses a certain amount of
education and refinement. He ought to expound weekly to his flock, in
simple, impressive words, the great truths of Christianity, and exhort his
hearers to walk in the paths of righteousness. Besides this, he is expected to
comfort the afflicted, to assist the needy, to counsel those who are harassed
with doubts, and to admonish those who openly stray from the narrow path.
Such is the ideal in the popular mind, and pastors generally seek to realise
it, if not in very deed, at least in appearance. The Russian priest, on the
contrary, has no such ideal set before him by his parishioners. He is
expected merely to conform to certain observances, and to perform
punctiliously the rites and ceremonies prescribed by the Church. If he does
this without practising extortion his parishioners are quite satisfied. He
rarely preaches or exhorts, and neither has nor seeks to have a moral
influence over his flock. I have occasionally heard of Russian priests who
approach to what I have termed the Protestant ideal, and I have even seen
one or two of them, but I fear they are not numerous.
In the above contrast I have accidentally omitted one important feature.
The Protestant clergy have in all countries rendered valuable service to the
cause of popular education. The reason of this is not difficult to find. In

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order to be a good Protestant it is necessary to "search the Scriptures," and
to do this, one must be able at least to read. To be a good member of the
Greek Orthodox Church, on the contrary, according to popular conceptions,
the reading of the Scriptures is not necessary, and therefore primary
education has not in the eyes of the Greek Orthodox priest the same
importance which it has in the eyes of the Protestant pastor.
It must be admitted that the Russian people are in a certain sense
religions. They go regularly to church on Sundays and holy-days, cross
themselves repeatedly when they pass a church or Icon, take the Holy
Communion at stated seasons, rigorously abstain from animal food—not
only on Wednesdays and Fridays, but also during Lent and the other long
fasts—make occasional pilgrimages to holy shrines, and, in a word, fulfil
punctiliously the ceremonial observances which they suppose necessary for
salvation. But here their religiousness ends. They are generally profoundly
ignorant of religious doctrine, and know little or nothing of Holy Writ. A
peasant, it is said, was once asked by a priest if he could name the three
Persons of the Trinity, and replied without a moment's hesitation, "How can
one not know that, Batushka? Of course it is the Saviour, the Mother of
God, and Saint Nicholas the miracle-worker!"
That answer represents fairly enough the theological attainments of a
very large section of the peasantry. The anecdote is so often repeated that it
is probably an invention, but it is not a calumny of theology and of what
Protestants term the "inner religious life" the orthodox Russian peasant—of
Dissenters, to whom these remarks do not apply, I shall speak later—has no
conception. For him the ceremonial part of religion suffices, and he has the
most unbounded, childlike confidence in the saving efficacy of the rites
which he practises. If he has been baptised in infancy, has regularly
observed the fasts, has annually partaken of the Holy Communion, and has
just confessed and received extreme unction, he feels death approach with
the most perfect tranquillity. He is tormented with no doubts as to the
efficacy of faith or works, and has no fears that his past life may possibly
have rendered him unfit for eternal felicity. Like a man in a sinking ship
who has buckled on his life-preserver, he feels perfectly secure. With no
fear for the future and little regret for the present or the past, he awaits
calmly the dread summons, and dies with a resignation which a Stoic
philosopher might envy.

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In the above paragraph I have used the word Icon, and perhaps the reader
may not clearly understand the word. Let me explain then, briefly, what an
Icon is—a very necessary explanation, for the Icons play an important part
in the religious observances of the Russian people.
Icons are pictorial, usually half-length, representations of the Saviour, of
the Madonna, or of a saint, executed in archaic Byzantine style, on a yellow
or gold ground, and varying in size from a square inch to several square
feet. Very often the whole picture, with the exception of the face and hands
of the figure, is covered with a metal plaque, embossed so as to represent
the form of the figure and the drapery. When this plaque is not used, the
crown and costume are often adorned with pearls and other precious stones
—sometimes of great price.
In respect of religions significance, Icons are of two kinds: simple, and
miraculous or miracle-working (tchudotvorny). The former are
manufactured in enormous quantities—chiefly in the province of Vladimir,
where whole villages are employed in this kind of work—and are to be
found in every Russian house, from the hut of the peasant to the palace of
the Emperor. They are generally placed high up in a corner facing the door,
and good orthodox Christians on entering bow in that direction, making at
the same time the sign of the cross. Before and after meals the same short
ceremony is always performed. On the eve of fete-days a small lamp is kept
burning before at least one of the Icons in the house.
The wonder-working Icons are comparatively few in number, and are
always carefully preserved in a church or chapel. They are commonly
believed to have been "not made with hands," and to have appeared in a
miraculous way. A monk, or it may be a common mortal, has a vision, in
which he is informed that he may find a miraculous Icon in such a place,
and on going to the spot indicated he finds it, sometimes buried, sometimes
hanging on a tree. The sacred treasure is then removed to a church, and the
news spreads like wildfire through the district. Thousands flock to prostrate
themselves before the heaven-sent picture, and some are healed of their
diseases—a fact that plainly indicates its miracle-working power. The
whole affair is then officially reported to the Most Holy Synod, the highest
ecclesiastical authority in Russia, in order that the existence of the miracle-
working power may be fully and regularly proved. The official recognition
of the fact is by no means a mere matter of form, for the Synod is well

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aware that wonder-working Icons are always a rich source of revenue to the
monasteries where they are kept, and that zealous Superiors are
consequently apt in such cases to lean to the side of credulity, rather than
that of over-severe criticism. A regular investigation is therefore made, and
the formal recognition is not granted till the testimony of the finder is
thoroughly examined and the alleged miracles duly authenticated. If the
recognition is granted, the Icon is treated with the greatest veneration, and
is sure to be visited by pilgrims from far and near.
Some of the most revered Icons—as, for instance, the Kazan Madonna—
have annual fete-days instituted in their honour; or, more correctly
speaking, the anniversary of their miraculous appearance is observed as a
religions holiday. A few of them have an additional title to popular respect
and veneration: that of being intimately associated with great events in the
national history. The Vladimir Madonna, for example, once saved Moscow
from the Tartars; the Smolensk Madonna accompanied the army in the
glorious campaign against Napoleon in 1812; and when in that year it was
known in Moscow that the French were advancing on the city, the people
wished the Metropolitan to take the Iberian Madonna, which may still be
seen near one of the gates of the Kremlin, and to lead them out armed with
hatchets against the enemy.
If the Russian priests have done little to advance popular education, they
have at least never intentionally opposed it. Unlike their Roman Catholic
brethren, they do not hold that "a little learning is a dangerous thing," and
do not fear that faith may be endangered by knowledge. Indeed, it is a
remarkable fact that the Russian Church regards with profound apathy those
various intellectual movements which cause serious alarm to many
thoughtful Christians in Western Europe. It considers religion as something
so entirely apart that its votaries do not feel the necessity of bringing their
theological beliefs into logical harmony with their scientific conceptions. A
man may remain a good orthodox Christian long after he has adopted
scientific opinions irreconcilable with Eastern Orthodoxy, or, indeed, with
dogmatic Christianity of any kind. In the confessional the priest never seeks
to ferret out heretical opinions; and I can recall no instance in Russian
history of a man being burnt at the stake on the demand of the ecclesiastical
authorities, as so often happened in the Roman Catholic world, for his
scientific views. This tolerance proceeds partly, no doubt, from the fact that
the Eastern Church in general, and the Russian Church in particular, have

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remained for centuries in a kind of intellectual torpor. Even such a fervent
orthodox Christian as the late Ivan Aksakof perceived this absence of
healthy vitality, and he did not hesitate to declare his conviction that,
"neither the Russian nor the Slavonic world will be resuscitated . . . so long
as the Church remains in such lifelessness (mertvennost'), which is not a
matter of chance, but the legitimate fruit of some organic defect."*

* Solovyoff, "Otcherki ig istorii Russkoi Literaturi XIX.
veka." St. Petersburg, 1903, p. 269.

Though the unsatisfactory condition of the parochial clergy is generally
recognised by the educated classes, very few people take the trouble to
consider seriously how it might be improved. During the Reform
enthusiasm which raged for some years after the Crimean War ecclesiastical
affairs were entirely overlooked. Many of the reformers of those days were
so very "advanced" that religion in all its forms seemed to them an old-
world superstition which tended to retard rather than accelerate social
progress, and which consequently should be allowed to die as tranquilly as
possible; whilst the men of more moderate views found they had enough to
do in emancipating the serfs and reforming the corrupt civil and judicial
Administration. During the subsequent reactionary period, which
culminated in the reign of the late Emperor, Alexander III., much more
attention was devoted to Church matters, and it came to be recognised in
official circles that something ought to be done for the parish clergy in the
way of improving their material condition so as to increase their moral
influence. With this object in view, M. Pobedonostsef, the Procurator of the
Holy Synod, induced the Government in 1893 to make a State-grant of
about 6,500,000 roubles, which should be increased every year, but the sum
was very inadequate, and a large portion of it was devoted to purposes of
political propaganda in the form of maintaining Greek Orthodox priests in
districts where the population was Protestant or Roman Catholic.
Consequently, of the 35,865 parishes which Russia contains, only 18,936,
or a little more than one-half, were enabled to benefit by the grant. In an
optimistic, semi-official statement published as late as 1896 it is admitted
that "the means for the support of the parish clergy must even now be
considered insufficient and wanting in stability, making the priests
dependent on the parishioners, and thereby preventing the establishment of
the necessary moral authority of the spiritual father over his flock."

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In some places the needs of the Church are attended to by voluntary
parish-curatorships which annually raise a certain sum of money, and the
way in which they distribute it is very characteristic of the Russian people,
who have a profound veneration for the Church and its rites, but very little
consideration for the human beings who serve at the altar. In 14,564
parishes possessing such curatorships no less than 2,500,000 roubles were
collected, but of this sum 2,000,000 were expended on the maintenance and
embellishment of churches, and only 174,000 were devoted to the personal
wants of the clergy. According to the semi-official document from which
these figures are taken the whole body of the Russian White Clergy in 1893
numbered 99,391, of whom 42,513 were priests, 12,953 deacons, and
43,925 clerks.
In more recent observations among the parochial clergy I have noticed
premonitory symptoms of important changes. This may be illustrated by an
entry in my note-book, written in a village of one of the Southern provinces,
under date of 30th September, 1903:
"I have made here the acquaintance of two good specimens of the parish
clergy, both excellent men in their way, but very different from each other.
The elder one, Father Dmitri, is of the old school, a plain, practical man,
who fulfils his duties conscientiously according to his lights, but without
enthusiasm. His intellectual wants are very limited, and he devotes his
attention chiefly to the practical affairs of everyday life, which he manages
very successfully. He does not squeeze his parishioners unduly, but he
considers that the labourer is worthy of his hire, and insists on his flock
providing for his wants according to their means. At the same time he farms
on his own account and attends personally to all the details of his farming
operations. With the condition and doings of every member of his flock he
is intimately acquainted, and, on the whole, as he never idealised anything
or anybody, he has not a very high opinion of them.
"The younger priest, Father Alexander, is of a different type, and the
difference may be remarked even in his external appearance. There is a look
of delicacy and refinement about him, though his dress and domestic
surroundings are of the plainest, and there is not a tinge of affectation in his
manner. His language is less archaic and picturesque. He uses fewer
Biblical and semi-Slavonic expressions—I mean expressions which belong
to the antiquated language of the Church Service rather than to modern

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parlance—and his armoury of terse popular proverbs which constitute such
a characteristic trait of the peasantry, is less frequently drawn on. When I
ask him about the present condition of the peasantry, his account does not
differ substantially from that of his elder colleague, but he does not
condemn their sins in the same forcible terms. He laments their
shortcomings in an evangelical spirit and has apparently aspirations for
their future improvement. Admitting frankly that there is a great deal of
lukewarmness among them, he hopes to revive their interest in
ecclesiastical affairs and he has an idea of constituting a sort of church
committee for attending to the temporal affairs of the village church and for
works of charity, but he looks to influencing the younger rather than the
older generation.
"His interest in his parishioners is not confined to their spiritual welfare,
but extends to their material well-being. Of late an association for mutual
credit has been founded in the village, and he uses his influence to induce
the peasants to take advantage of the benefits it offers, both to those who
are in need of a little ready money and to those who might invest their
savings, instead of keeping them hidden away in an old stocking or buried
in an earthen pot. The proposal to create a local agricultural society meets
also with his sympathy."
If the number of parish priests of this type increase, the clergy may come
to exercise great moral influence on the common people.

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CHAPTER V
A MEDICAL CONSULTATION

Unexpected Illness—A Village Doctor—Siberian Plague—My Studies—
Russian Historians—A Russian Imitator of Dickens—A ci-devant Domestic
Serf—Medicine and Witchcraft—A Remnant of Paganism—Credulity of
the Peasantry—Absurd Rumours—A Mysterious Visit from St. Barbara—
Cholera on Board a Steamer—Hospitals—Lunatic Asylums—Amongst
Maniacs.
In enumerating the requisites for travelling in the less frequented parts of
Russia, I omitted to mention one important condition: the traveller should
be always in good health, and in case of illness be ready to dispense with
regular medical attendance. This I learned by experience during my stay at
Ivanofka.
A man who is accustomed to be always well, and has consequently cause
to believe himself exempt from the ordinary ills that flesh is heir to,
naturally feels aggrieved—as if some one had inflicted upon him an
undeserved injury—when he suddenly finds himself ill. At first he refuses
to believe the fact, and, as far as possible, takes no notice of the
disagreeable symptoms.
Such was my state of mind on being awakened early one morning by
peculiar symptoms which I had never before experienced. Unwilling to
admit to myself the possibility of being ill, I got up, and endeavoured to
dress as usual, but very soon discovered that I was unable to stand. There
was no denying the fact; not only was I ill, but the malady, whatever it was,
surpassed my powers of diagnosis; and when the symptoms increased
steadily all that day and the following night, I was constrained to take the
humiliating decision of asking for medical advice. To my inquiries whether
there was a doctor in the neighbourhood, the old servant replied, "There is
not exactly a doctor, but there is a Feldsher in the village."
"And what is a Feldsher?"
"A Feldsher is . . . . is a Feldsher."

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"I am quite aware of that, but I would like to know what you mean by the
word. What is this Feldsher?"
"He's an old soldier who dresses wounds and gives physic."
The definition did not predispose me in favour of the mysterious
personage, but as there was nothing better to be had I ordered him to be sent
for, notwithstanding the strenuous opposition of the old servant, who
evidently did not believe in feldshers.
In about half an hour a tall, broad-shouldered man entered, and stood bolt
upright in the middle of the room in the attitude which is designated in
military language by the word "Attention." His clean-shaven chin, long
moustache, and closely-cropped hair confirmed one part of the old servant's
definition; he was unmistakably an old soldier.
"You are a Feldsher," I said, making use of the word which I had recently
added to my vocabulary.
"Exactly so, your Nobility!" These words, the ordinary form of
affirmation used by soldiers to their officers, were pronounced in a loud,
metallic, monotonous tone, as if the speaker had been an automaton
conversing with a brother automaton at a distance of twenty yards. As soon
as the words were pronounced the mouth of the machine closed
spasmodically, and the head, which had been momentarily turned towards
me, reverted to its former position with a jerk as if it had received the order
"Eyes front!"
"Then please to sit down here, and I'll tell you about my ailment." Upon
this the figure took three paces to the front, wheeled to the right-about, and
sat down on the edge of the chair, retaining the position of "Attention" as
nearly as the sitting posture would allow. When the symptoms had been
carefully described, he knitted his brows, and after some reflection
remarked, "I can give you a dose of . . . ." Here followed a long word which
I did not understand.
"I don't wish you to give me a dose of anything till I know what is the
matter with me. Though a bit of a doctor myself, I have no idea what it is,
and, pardon me, I think you are in the same position." Noticing a look of
ruffled professional dignity on his face, I added, as a sedative, "It is
evidently something very peculiar, so that if the first medical practitioner in
the country were present he would probably be as much puzzled as
ourselves."

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The sedative had the desired effect. "Well, sir, to tell you the truth," he
said, in a more human tone of voice, "I do not clearly understand what it is."
"Exactly; and therefore I think we had better leave the cure to Nature,
and not interfere with her mode of treatment."
"Perhaps it would be better."
"No doubt. And now, since I have to lie here on my back, and feel rather
lonely, I should like to have a talk with you. You are not in a hurry, I hope?"
"Not at all. My assistant knows where I am, and will send for me if I am
required."
"So you have an assistant, have you?"
"Oh, yes; a very sharp young fellow, who has been two years in the
Feldsher school, and has now come here to help me and learn more by
practice. That is a new way. I never was at a school of the kind myself, and
had to pick up what I could when a servant in the hospital. There were, I
believe, no such schools in my time. The one where my assistant learned
was opened by the Zemstvo."
"The Zemstvo is the new local administration, is it not?"
"Exactly so. And I could not do without the assistant," continued my new
acquaintance, gradually losing his rigidity, and showing himself, what he
really was, a kindly, talkative man. "I have often to go to other villages, and
almost every day a number of peasants come here. At first I had very little
to do, for the people thought I was an official, and would make them pay
dearly for what I should give them; but now they know that they don't
require to pay, and come in great numbers. And everything I give them—
though sometimes I don't clearly understand what the matter is—seems to
do them good. I believe that faith does as much as physic."
"In my country," I remarked, "there is a sect of doctors who get the
benefit of that principle. They give their patients two or three little balls no
bigger than a pin's head, or a few drops of tasteless liquid, and they
sometimes work wonderful cures."
"That system would not do for us. The Russian muzhik would have no
faith if he swallowed merely things of that kind. What he believes in is
something with a very bad taste, and lots of it. That is his idea of a
medicine; and he thinks that the more he takes of a medicine the better
chance he has of getting well. When I wish to give a peasant several doses I

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make him come for each separate dose, for I know that if I did not he would
probably swallow the whole as soon as he was out of sight. But there is not
much serious disease here—not like what I used to see on the Sheksna. You
have been on the Sheksna?"
"Not yet, but I intend going there." The Sheksna is a river which falls into
the Volga, and forms part of the great system of water-communication
connecting the Volga with the Neva.
"When you go there you will see lots of diseases. If there is a hot
summer, and plenty of barges passing, something is sure to break out—
typhus, or black small-pox, or Siberian plague, or something of the kind.
That Siberian plague is a curious thing. Whether it really comes from
Siberia, God only knows. So soon as it breaks out the horses die by dozens,
and sometimes men and women are attacked, though it is not properly a
human disease. They say that flies carry the poison from the dead horses to
the people. The sign of it is a thing like a boil, with a dark-coloured rim. If
this is cut open in time the person may recover, but if it is not, the person
dies. There is cholera, too, sometimes."
"What a delightful country," I said to myself, "for a young doctor who
wishes to make discoveries in the science of disease!"
The catalogue of diseases inhabiting this favoured region was apparently
not yet complete, but it was cut short for the moment by the arrival of the
assistant, with the announcement that his superior was wanted.
This first interview with the feldsher was, on the whole, satisfactory. He
had not rendered me any medical assistance, but he had helped me to pass
an hour pleasantly, and had given me a little information of the kind I
desired. My later interviews with him were equally agreeable. He was
naturally an intelligent, observant man, who had seen a great deal of the
Russian world, and could describe graphically what he had seen.
Unfortunately the horizontal position to which I was condemned prevented
me from noting down at the time the interesting things which he related to
me. His visits, together with those of Karl Karl'itch and of the priest, who
kindly spent a great part of his time with me, helped me to while away
many an hour which would otherwise have been dreary enough.
During the intervals when I was alone I devoted myself to reading—
sometimes Russian history and sometimes works of fiction. The history was
that of Karamzin, who may fairly be called the Russian Livy. It interested

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me much by the facts which it contained, but irritated me not a little by the
rhetorical style in which it is written. Afterwards, when I had waded
through some twenty volumes of the gigantic work of Solovyoff—or
Solovief, as the name is sometimes unphonetically written—which is
simply a vast collection of valuable but undigested material, I was much
less severe on the picturesque descriptions and ornate style of his illustrious
predecessor. The first work of fiction which I read was a collection of tales
by Grigorovitch, which had been given to me by the author on my departure
from St. Petersburg. These tales, descriptive of rural life in Russia, had been
written, as the author afterwards admitted to me, under the influence of
Dickens. Many of the little tricks and affectations which became painfully
obtrusive in Dickens's later works I had no difficulty in recognising under
their Russian garb. In spite of these I found the book very pleasant reading,
and received from it some new notions—to be afterwards verified, of
course—about Russian peasant life.
One of these tales made a deep impression upon me, and I still remember
the chief incidents. The story opens with the description of a village in late
autumn. It has been raining for some time heavily, and the road has become
covered with a deep layer of black mud. An old woman—a small proprietor
—is sitting at home with a friend, drinking tea and trying to read the future
by means of a pack of cards. This occupation is suddenly interrupted by the
entrance of a female servant, who announces that she has discovered an old
man, apparently very ill, lying in one of the outhouses. The old woman goes
out to see her uninvited guest, and, being of a kindly nature, prepares to
have him removed to a more comfortable place, and properly attended to;
but her servant whispers to her that perhaps he is a vagrant, and the
generous impulse is thereby checked. When it is discovered that the
suspicion is only too well founded, and that the man has no passport, the
old woman becomes thoroughly alarmed. Her imagination pictures to her
the terrible consequences that would ensue if the police should discover that
she had harboured a vagrant. All her little fortune might be extorted from
her. And if the old man should happen to die in her house or farmyard! The
consequences in that case might be very serious. Not only might she lose
everything, but she might even be dragged to prison. At the sight of these
dangers the old woman forgets her tender-heartedness, and becomes
inexorable. The old man, sick unto death though he be, must leave the
premises instantly. Knowing full well that he will nowhere find a refuge, he

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walks forth into the cold, dark, stormy night, and next morning a dead body
is found at a short distance from the village.
Why this story, which was not strikingly remarkable for artistic merit,
impressed me so deeply I cannot say. Perhaps it was because I was myself
ill at the time, and imagined how terrible it would be to be turned out on the
muddy road on a cold, wet October night. Besides this, the story interested
me as illustrating the terror which the police inspired during the reign of
Nicholas I. The ingenious devices which they employed for extorting
money formed the subject of another sketch, which I read shortly
afterwards, and which has likewise remained in my memory. The facts were
as follows: An officer of rural police, when driving on a country road, finds
a dead body by the wayside. Congratulating himself on this bit of good
luck, he proceeds to the nearest village, and lets the inhabitants know that
all manner of legal proceedings will be taken against them, so that the
supposed murderer may be discovered. The peasants are of course
frightened, and give him a considerable sum of money in order that he may
hush up the affair. An ordinary officer of police would have been quite
satisfied with this ransom, but this officer is not an ordinary man, and is
very much in need of money; he conceives, therefore, the brilliant idea of
repeating the experiment. Taking up the dead body, he takes it away in his
tarantass, and a few hours later declares to the inhabitants of a village some
miles off that some of them have been guilty of murder, and that he intends
to investigate the matter thoroughly. The peasants of course pay liberally in
order to escape the investigation, and the rascally officer, emboldened by
success, repeats the trick in different villages until he has gathered a large
sum.
Tales and sketches of this kind were very much in fashion during the
years which followed the death of the great autocrat, Nicholas I., when the
long-pent-up indignation against his severe, repressive regime was suddenly
allowed free expression, and they were still much read during the first years
of my stay in the country. Now the public taste has changed. The reform
enthusiast has evaporated, and the existing administrative abuses, more
refined and less comical than their predecessors, receive comparatively
little attention from the satirists.
When I did not feel disposed to read, and had none of my regular visitors
with me, I sometimes spent an hour or two in talking with the old man-

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servant who attended me. Anton was decidedly an old man, but what his
age precisely was I never could discover; either he did not know himself, or
he did not wish to tell me. In appearance he seemed about sixty, but from
certain remarks which he made I concluded that he must be nearer seventy,
though he had scarcely a grey hair on his head. As to who his father was he
seemed, like the famous Topsy, to have no very clear ideas, but he had an
advantage over Topsy with regard to his maternal ancestry. His mother had
been a serf who had fulfilled for some time the functions of a lady's maid,
and after the death of her mistress had been promoted to a not very clearly
defined position of responsibility in the household. Anton, too, had been
promoted in his time. His first function in the household had been that of
assistant-keeper of the tobacco-pipes, from which humble office he had
gradually risen to a position which may be roughly designated as that of
butler. All this time he had been, of course, a serf, as his mother had been
before him; but being naturally a man of sluggish intellect, he had never
thoroughly realised the fact, and had certainly never conceived the
possibility of being anything different from what he was. His master was
master, and he himself was Anton, obliged to obey his master, or at least
conceal disobedience—these were long the main facts in his conception of
the universe, and, as philosophers generally do with regard to fundamental
facts or axioms, he had accepted them without examination. By means of
these simple postulates he had led a tranquil life, untroubled by doubts,
until the year 1861, when the so-called freedom was brought to Ivanofka.
He himself had not gone to the church to hear Batushka read the Tsar's
manifesto, but his master, on returning from the ceremony, had called him
and said, "Anton, you are free now, but the Tsar says you are to serve as you
have done for two years longer."
To this startling announcement Anton had replied coolly, "Slushayus," or,
as we would say, "Yes, sir," and without further comment had gone to fetch
his master's breakfast; but what he saw and heard during the next few weeks
greatly troubled his old conceptions of human society and the fitness of
things. From that time must be dated, I suppose, the expression of mental
confusion which his face habitually wore.
The first thing that roused his indignation was the conduct of his fellow-
servants. Nearly all the unmarried ones seemed to be suddenly attacked by a
peculiar matrimonial mania. The reason of this was that the new law
expressly gave permission to the emancipated serfs to marry as they chose

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without the consent of their masters, and nearly all the unmarried adults
hastened to take advantage of their newly-acquired privilege, though many
of them had great difficulty in raising the capital necessary to pay the
priest's fees. Then came disorders among the peasantry, the death of the old
master, and the removal of the family first to St. Petersburg, and afterwards
to Germany. Anton's mind had never been of a very powerful order, and
these great events had exercised a deleterious influence upon it. When Karl
Karl'itch, at the expiry of the two years, informed him that he might now go
where he chose, he replied, with a look of blank, unfeigned astonishment,
"Where can I go to?" He had never conceived the possibility of being
forced to earn his bread in some new way, and begged Karl Karl'itch to let
him remain where he was. This request was readily granted, for Anton was
an honest, faithful servant, and sincerely attached to the family, and it was
accordingly arranged that he should receive a small monthly salary, and
occupy an intermediate position between those of major-domo and head
watch-dog.
Had Anton been transformed into a real watch-dog he could scarcely
have slept more than he did. His power of sleeping, and his somnolence
when he imagined he was awake, were his two most prominent
characteristics. Out of consideration for his years and his love of repose, I
troubled him as little as possible; but even the small amount of service
which I demanded he contrived to curtail in an ingenious way. The time and
exertion required for traversing the intervening space between his own
room and mine might, he thought, be more profitably employed; and
accordingly he extemporised a bed in a small ante-chamber, close to my
door, and took up there his permanent abode. If sonorous snoring be
sufficient proof that the performer is asleep, then I must conclude that
Anton devoted about three-fourths of his time to sleeping and a large part of
the remaining fourth to yawning and elongated guttural ejaculations. At first
this little arrangement considerably annoyed me, but I bore it patiently, and
afterwards received my reward, for during my illness I found it very
convenient to have an attendant within call. And I must do Anton the justice
to say that he served me well in his own somnolent fashion. He seemed to
have the faculty of hearing when asleep, and generally appeared in my
room before he had succeeded in getting his eyes completely open.
Anton had never found time, during his long life, to form many opinions,
but he had somehow imbibed or inhaled a few convictions, all of a

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decidedly conservative kind, and one of these was that feldshers were
useless and dangerous members of society. Again and again he had advised
me to have nothing to do with the one who visited me, and more than once
he recommended to me an old woman of the name of Masha, who lived in a
village a few miles off. Masha was what is known in Russia as a znakharka
—that is to say, a woman who is half witch, half medical practitioner—the
whole permeated with a strong leaven of knavery. According to Anton, she
could effect by means of herbs and charms every possible cure short of
raising from the dead, and even with regard to this last operation he
cautiously refrained from expressing an opinion.
The idea of being subjected to a course of herbs and charms by an old
woman who probably knew very little about the hidden properties of either,
did not seem to me inviting, and more than once I flatly refused to have
recourse to such unhallowed means. On due consideration, however, I
thought that a professional interview with the old witch would be rather
amusing, and then a brilliant idea occurred to me! I would bring together
the feldsher and the znakharka, who no doubt hated each other with a
Kilkenny-cat hatred, and let them fight out their differences before me for
the benefit of science and my own delectation.
The more I thought of my project, the more I congratulated myself on
having conceived such a scheme; but, alas! in this very imperfectly
organised world of ours brilliant ideas are seldom realised, and in this case I
was destined to be disappointed. Did the old woman's black art warn her of
approaching danger, or was she simply actuated by a feeling of professional
jealousy and considerations of professional etiquette? To this question I can
give no positive answer, but certain it is that she could not be induced to
pay me a visit, and I was thus balked of my expected amusement. I
succeeded, however, in learning indirectly something about the old witch.
She enjoyed among her neighbours that solid, durable kind of respect which
is founded on vague, undefinable fear, and was believed to have effected
many remarkable cures. In the treatment of syphilitic diseases, which are
fearfully common among the Russian peasantry, she was supposed to be
specially successful, and I have no doubt, from the vague descriptions
which I received, that the charm which she employed in these cases was of
a mercurial kind. Some time afterward I saw one of her victims. Whether
she had succeeded in destroying the poison I know not, but she had at least
succeeded in destroying most completely the patient's teeth. How women of

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this kind obtain mercury, and how they have discovered its medicinal
properties, I cannot explain. Neither can I explain how they have come to
know the peculiar properties of ergot of rye, which they frequently employ
for illicit purposes familiar to all students of medical jurisprudence.
The znakharka and the feldsher represent two very different periods in
the history of medical science—the magical and the scientific. The Russian
peasantry have still many conceptions which belong to the former. The
great majority of them are already quite willing, under ordinary
circumstances, to use the scientific means of healing; but as soon as a
violent epidemic breaks out, and the scientific means prove unequal to the
occasion, the old faith revives, and recourse is had to magical rites and
incantations. Of these rites many are very curious. Here, for instance, is one
which had been performed in a village near which I afterwards lived for
some time. Cholera had been raging in the district for several weeks. In the
village in question no case had yet occurred, but the inhabitants feared that
the dreaded visitor would soon arrive, and the following ingenious
contrivance was adopted for warding off the danger. At midnight, when the
male population was supposed to be asleep, all the maidens met in
nocturnal costume, according to a preconcerted plan, and formed a
procession. In front marched a girl, holding an Icon. Behind her came her
companions, dragging a sokha—the primitive plough commonly used by
the peasantry—by means of a long rope. In this order the procession made
the circuit of the entire village, and it was confidently believed that the
cholera would not be able to overstep the magical circle thus described.
Many of the males probably knew, or at least suspected, what was going on;
but they prudently remained within doors, knowing well that if they should
be caught peeping indiscreetly at the mystic ceremony, they would be
unmercifully beaten by those who were taking part in it.
This custom is doubtless a survival of old pagan superstitions. The
introduction of the Icon is a modern innovation, which illustrates that
curious blending of paganism and Christianity which is often to be met with
in Russia, and of which I shall have more to say in another chapter.
Sometimes, when an epidemic breaks out, the panic produced takes a
more dangerous form. The people suspect that it is the work of the doctors,
or that some ill-disposed persons have poisoned the wells, and no amount of
reasoning will convince them that their own habitual disregard of the most

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simple sanitary precautions has something to do with the phenomenon. I
know of one case where an itinerant photographer was severely maltreated
in consequence of such suspicions; and once, in St. Petersburg, during the
reign of Nicholas I., a serious riot took place. The excited populace had
already thrown several doctors out of the windows of the hospital, when the
Emperor arrived, unattended, in an open carriage, and quelled the
disturbance by his simple presence, aided by his stentorian voice.
Of the ignorant credulity of the Russian peasantry I might relate many
curious illustrations. The most absurd rumours sometimes awaken
consternation throughout a whole district. One of the most common reports
of this kind is that a female conscription is about to take place. About the
time of the Duke of Edinburgh's marriage with the daughter of Alexander II.
this report was specially frequent. A large number of young girls were to be
kidnapped and sent to England in a red ship. Why the ship was to be red I
can easily explain, because in the peasants' language the conceptions of red
and beautiful are expressed by the same word (krasny), and in the popular
legends the epithet is indiscriminately applied to everything connected with
princes and great personages; but what was to be done with the kidnapped
maidens when they arrived at their destination, I never succeeded in
discovering.
The most amusing instance of credulity which I can recall was the
following, related to me by a peasant woman who came from the village
where the incident had occurred. One day in winter, about the time of
sunset, a peasant family was startled by the entrance of a strange visitor, a
female figure, dressed as St. Barbara is commonly represented in the
religious pictures. All present were very much astonished by this apparition;
but the figure told them, in a low, soft voice, to be of good cheer, for she
was St. Barbara, and had come to honour the family with a visit as a reward
for their piety. The peasant thus favoured was not remarkable for his piety,
but he did not consider it necessary to correct the mistake of his saintly
visitor, and requested her to be seated. With perfect readiness she accepted
the invitation, and began at once to discourse in an edifying way.
Meanwhile the news of this wonderful apparition spread like wildfire,
and all the inhabitants of the village, as well as those of a neighbouring
village about a mile distant, collected in and around the house. Whether the
priest was among those who came my informant did not know. Many of

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those who had come could not get within hearing, but those at the outskirts
of the crowd hoped that the saint might come out before disappearing. Their
hopes were gratified. About midnight the mysterious visitor announced that
she would go and bring St. Nicholas, the miracle-worker, and requested all
to remain perfectly still during her absence. The crowd respectfully made
way for her, and she passed out into the darkness. With breathless
expectation all awaited the arrival of St. Nicholas, who is the favourite saint
of the Russian peasantry; but hours passed, and he did not appear. At last,
toward sunrise, some of the less zealous spectators began to return home,
and those of them who had come from the neighbouring village discovered
to their horror that during their absence their horses had been stolen! At
once they raised the hue-and-cry; and the peasants scoured the country in
all directions in search of the soi-disant St. Barbara and her accomplices,
but they never recovered the stolen property. "And serve them right, the
blockheads!" added my informant, who had herself escaped falling into the
trap by being absent from the village at the time.
It is but fair to add that the ordinary Russian peasant, though in some
respects extremely credulous, and, like all other people, subject to
occasional panics, is by no means easily frightened by real dangers. Those
who have seen them under fire will readily credit this statement. For my
own part, I have had opportunities of observing them merely in dangers of a
non-military kind, and have often admired the perfect coolness displayed.
Even an epidemic alarms them only when it attains a certain degree of
intensity. Once I had a good opportunity of observing this on board a large
steamer on the Volga. It was a very hot day in the early autumn. As it was
well known that there was a great deal of Asiatic cholera all over the
country, prudent people refrained from eating much raw fruit; but Russian
peasants are not generally prudent men, and I noticed that those on board
were consuming enormous quantities of raw cucumbers and water-melons.
This imprudence was soon followed by its natural punishment. I refrain
from describing the scene that ensued, but I may say that those who were
attacked received from the others every possible assistance. Had no
unforeseen accident happened, we should have arrived at Kazan on the
following morning, and been able to send the patients to the hospital of that
town; but as there was little water in the river, we had to cast anchor for the
night, and next morning we ran aground and stuck fast. Here we had to
remain patiently till a smaller steamer hove in sight. All this time there was

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not the slightest symptom of panic, and when the small steamer came
alongside there was no frantic rush to get away from the infected vessel,
though it was quite evident that only a few of the passengers could be taken
off. Those who were nearest the gangway went quietly on board the small
steamer, and those who were less fortunate remained patiently till another
steamer happened to pass.
The old conceptions of disease, as something that may be most
successfully cured by charms and similar means, are rapidly disappearing.
The Zemstvo—that is to say, the new local self-government—has done
much towards this end by enabling the people to procure better medical
attendance. In the towns there are public hospitals, which generally are—or
at least seem to an unprofessional eye—in a very satisfactory condition. The
resident doctors are daily besieged by a crowd of peasants, who come from
far and near to ask advice and receive medicines. Besides this, in some
provinces feldshers are placed in the principal villages, and the doctor
makes frequent tours of inspection. The doctors are generally well-educated
men, and do a large amount of work for a very small remuneration.
Of the lunatic asylums, which are generally attached to the larger
hospitals, I cannot speak very favourably. Some of the great central ones are
all that could be desired, but others are badly constructed and fearfully
overcrowded. One or two of those I visited appeared to me to be conducted
on very patriarchal principles, as the following incident may illustrate.
I had been visiting a large hospital, and had remained there so long that it
was already dark before I reached the adjacent lunatic asylum. Seeing no
lights in the windows, I proposed to my companion, who was one of the
inspectors, that we should delay our visit till the following morning, but he
assured me that by the regulations the lights ought not to be extinguished
till considerably later, and consequently there was no objection to our going
in at once. If there was no legal objection, there was at least a physical
obstruction in the form of a large wooden door, and all our efforts to attract
the attention of the porter or some other inmate were unavailing. At last,
after much ringing, knocking, and shouting, a voice from within asked us
who we were and what we wanted. A brief reply from my companion, not
couched in the most polite or amiable terms, made the bolts rattle and the
door open with surprising rapidity, and we saw before us an old man with

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long dishevelled hair, who, as far as appearance went, might have been one
of the lunatics, bowing obsequiously and muttering apologies.
After groping our way along a dark corridor we entered a still darker
room, and the door was closed and locked behind us. As the key turned in
the rusty lock a wild scream rang through the darkness! Then came a yell,
then a howl, and then various sounds which the poverty of the English
language prevents me from designating—the whole blending into a hideous
discord that would have been at home in some of the worst regions of
Dante's Inferno. As to the cause of it I could not even form a conjecture.
Gradually my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, and I could dimly
perceive white figures flitting about the room. At the same time I felt
something standing near me, and close to my shoulder I saw a pair of eyes
and long streaming hair. On my other side, equally close, was something
very like a woman's night-cap. Though by no means of a nervous
temperament, I felt uncomfortable. To be shut up in a dark room with an
indefinite number of excited maniacs is not a comfortable position. How
long the imprisonment lasted I know not—probably not more than two or
three minutes, but it seemed a long time. At last a light was procured, and
the whole affair was explained. The guardians, not expecting the visit of an
inspector at so late an hour, had retired for the night much earlier than
usual, and the old porter had put us into the nearest ward until he could
fetch a light—locking the door behind us lest any of the lunatics should
escape. The noise had awakened one of the unfortunate inmates of the ward,
and her hysterical scream had terrified the others.
By the influence of asylums, hospitals, and similar institutions, the old
conceptions of disease, as I have said, are gradually dying out, but the
znakharka still finds practice. The fact that the znakharka is to be found side
by side not only with the feldsher, but also with the highly trained
bacteriologist, is very characteristic of Russian civilisation, which is a
strange conglomeration of products belonging to very different periods. The
enquirer who undertakes the study of it will sometimes be scarcely less
surprised than would be the naturalist who should unexpectedly stumble
upon antediluvian megatheria grazing tranquilly in the same field with prize
Southdowns. He will discover the most primitive institutions side by side
with the latest products of French doctrinairism, and the most childish
superstitions in close proximity with the most advanced free-thinking.

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Page 108

CHAPTER VI
A PEASANT FAMILY OF THE OLD TYPE

Ivan Petroff—His Past Life—Co-operative Associations—Constitution
of a Peasant's Household—Predominance of Economic Conceptions over
those of Blood-relationship—Peasant Marriages—Advantages of Living in
Large Families—Its Defects—Family Disruptions and their Consequences.
My illness had at least one good result. It brought me into contact with
the feldsher, and through him, after my recovery, I made the acquaintance
of several peasants living in the village. Of these by far the most interesting
was an old man called Ivan Petroff.
Ivan must have been about sixty years of age, but was still robust and
strong, and had the reputation of being able to mow more hay in a given
time than any other peasant in the village. His head would have made a line
study for a portrait-painter. Like Russian peasants in general, he wore his
hair parted in the middle—a custom which perhaps owes its origin to the
religious pictures. The reverend appearance given to his face by his long
fair beard, slightly tinged with grey, was in part counteracted by his eyes,
which had a strange twinkle in them—whether of humour or of roguery, it
was difficult to say. Under all circumstances—whether in his light,
nondescript summer costume, or in his warm sheep-skin, or in the long,
glossy, dark-blue, double-breasted coat which he put on occasionally on
Sundays and holidays—he always looked a well-fed, respectable,
prosperous member of society; whilst his imperturbable composure, and the
entire absence of obsequiousness or truculence in his manner, indicated
plainly that he possessed no small amount of calm, deep-rooted self-respect.
A stranger, on seeing him, might readily have leaped to the conclusion that
he must be the Village Elder, but in reality he was a simple member of the
Commune, like his neighbour, poor Zakhar Leshkof, who never let slip an
opportunity of getting drunk, was always in debt, and, on the whole,
possessed a more than dubious reputation.
Ivan had, it is true, been Village Elder some years before. When elected
by the Village Assembly, against his own wishes, he had said quietly, "Very

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well, children; I will serve my three years"; and at the end of that period,
when the Assembly wished to re-elect him, he had answered firmly, "No,
children; I have served my term. It is now the turn of some one who is
younger, and has more time. There's Peter Alekseyef, a good fellow, and an
honest; you may choose him." And the Assembly chose the peasant
indicated; for Ivan, though a simple member of the Commune, had more
influence in Communal affairs than any other half-dozen members put
together. No grave matter was decided without his being consulted, and
there was at least one instance on record of the Village Assembly
postponing deliberations for a week because he happened to be absent in St.
Petersburg.
No stranger casually meeting Ivan would ever for a moment have
suspected that that big man, of calm, commanding aspect, had been during a
great part of his life a serf. And yet a serf he had been from his birth till he
was about thirty years of age—not merely a serf of the State, but the serf of
a proprietor who had lived habitually on his property. For thirty years of his
life he had been dependent on the arbitrary will of a master who had the
legal power to flog him as often and as severely as he considered desirable.
In reality he had never been subjected to corporal punishment, for the
proprietor to whom he had belonged had been, though in some respects
severe, a just and intelligent master.
Ivan's bright, sympathetic face had early attracted the master's attention,
and it was decided that he should learn a trade. For this purpose he was sent
to Moscow, and apprenticed there to a carpenter. After four years of
apprenticeship he was able not only to earn his own bread, but to help the
household in the payment of their taxes, and to pay annually to his master a
fixed yearly sum—first ten, then twenty, then thirty, and ultimately, for
some years immediately before the Emancipation, seventy roubles. In return
for this annual sum he was free to work and wander about as he pleased,
and for some years he had made ample use of his conditional liberty. I never
succeeded in extracting from him a chronological account of his travels, but
I could gather from his occasional remarks that he had wandered over a
great part of European Russia. Evidently he had been in his youth what is
colloquially termed "a roving blade," and had by no means confined himself
to the trade which he had learned during his four years of apprenticeship.
Once he had helped to navigate a raft from Vetluga to Astrakhan, a distance
of about two thousand miles. At another time he had been at Archangel and

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Onega, on the shores of the White Sea. St. Petersburg and Moscow were
both well known to him, and he had visited Odessa.
The precise nature of Ivan's occupations during these wanderings I could
not ascertain; for, with all his openness of manner, he was extremely
reticent regarding his commercial affairs. To all my inquiries on this topic
he was wont to reply vaguely, "Lesnoe dyelo"—that is to say, "Timber
business"; and from this I concluded that his chief occupation had been that
of a timber merchant. Indeed, when I knew him, though he was no longer a
regular trader, he was always ready to buy any bit of forest that could be
bought in the vicinity for a reasonable price.
During all this nomadic period of his life Ivan had never entirely severed
his connection with his native village or with agricultural life. When about
the age of twenty he had spent several months at home, taking part in the
field labour, and had married a wife—a strong, healthy young woman, who
had been selected for him by his mother, and strongly recommended to him
on account of her good character and her physical strength. In the opinion
of Ivan's mother, beauty was a kind of luxury which only nobles and rich
merchants could afford, and ordinary comeliness was a very secondary
consideration—so secondary as to be left almost entirely out of sight. This
was likewise the opinion of Ivan's wife. She had never been comely herself,
she used to say, but she had been a good wife to her husband. He had never
complained about her want of good looks, and had never gone after those
who were considered good-looking. In expressing this opinion she always
first bent forward, then drew herself up to her full length, and finally gave a
little jerky nod sideways, so as to clench the statement. Then Ivan's bright
eye would twinkle more brightly than usual, and he would ask her how she
knew that—reminding her that he was not always at home. This was Ivan's
stereotyped mode of teasing his wife, and every time he employed it he was
called an "old scarecrow," or something of the kind.
Perhaps, however, Ivan's jocular remark had more significance in it than
his wife cared to admit, for during the first years of their married life they
had seen very little of each other. A few days after the marriage, when
according to our notions the honeymoon should be at its height, Ivan had
gone to Moscow for several months, leaving his young bride to the care of
his father and mother. The young bride did not consider this an
extraordinary hardship, for many of her companions had been treated in the

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same way, and according to public opinion in that part of the country there
was nothing abnormal in the proceeding. Indeed, it may be said in general
that there is very little romance or sentimentality about Russian peasant
marriages. In this as in other respects the Russian peasantry are, as a class,
extremely practical and matter-of-fact in their conceptions and habits, and
are not at all prone to indulge in sublime, ethereal sentiments of any kind.
They have little or nothing of what may be termed the Hermann and
Dorothea element in their composition, and consequently know very little
about those sentimental, romantic ideas which we habitually associate with
the preliminary steps to matrimony. Even those authors who endeavour to
idealise peasant life have rarely ventured to make their story turn on a
sentimental love affair. Certainly in real life the wife is taken as a helpmate,
or in plain language a worker, rather than as a companion, and the mother-
in-law leaves her very little time to indulge in fruitless dreaming.
As time wore on, and his father became older and frailer, Ivan's visits to
his native place became longer and more frequent, and when the old man
was at last incapable of work, Ivan settled down permanently and undertook
the direction of the household. In the meantime his own children had been
growing up. When I knew the family it comprised—besides two daughters
who had married early and gone to live with their parents-in-law—Ivan and
his wife, two sons, three daughters-in-law, and an indefinite and frequently
varying number of grandchildren. The fact that there were three daughters-
in-law and only two sons was the result of the Conscription, which had
taken away the youngest son shortly after his marriage. The two who
remained spent only a small part of the year at home. The one was a
carpenter and the other a bricklayer, and both wandered about the country in
search of employment, as their father had done in his younger days. There
was, however, one difference. The father had always shown a leaning
towards commercial transactions, rather than the simple practice of his
handicraft, and consequently he had usually lived and travelled alone. The
sons, on the contrary, confined themselves to their handicrafts, and were
always during the working season members of an artel.
The artel in its various forms is a curious institution. Those to which
Ivan's sons belonged were simply temporary, itinerant associations of
workmen, who during the summer lived together, fed together, worked
together, and periodically divided amongst themselves the profits. This is
the primitive form of the institution, and is now not very often met with.

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Here, as elsewhere, capital has made itself felt, and destroyed that equality
which exists among the members of an artel in the above sense of the word.
Instead of forming themselves into a temporary association, the workmen
now generally make an engagement with a contractor who has a little
capital, and receive from him fixed monthly wages. The only association
which exists in this case is for the purchase and preparation of provisions,
and even these duties are very often left to the contractor.
In some of the larger towns there are artels of a much more complex kind
—permanent associations, possessing a large capital, and pecuniarily
responsible for the acts of the individual members. Of these, by far the most
celebrated is that of the Bank Porters. These men have unlimited
opportunities of stealing, and are often entrusted with the guarding or
transporting of enormous sums; but the banker has no cause for anxiety,
because he knows that if any defalcations occur they will be made good to
him by the artel. Such accidents very rarely happen, and the fact is by no
means so extraordinary as many people suppose. The artel, being
responsible for the individuals of which it is composed, is very careful in
admitting new members, and a man when admitted is closely watched, not
only by the regularly constituted office-bearers, but also by all his fellow-
members who have an opportunity of observing him. If he begins to spend
money too freely or to neglect his duties, though his employer may know
nothing of the fact, suspicions are at once aroused among his fellow-
members, and an investigation ensues—ending in summary expulsion if the
suspicions prove to have been well founded. Mutual responsibility, in short,
creates a very effective system of mutual supervision.
Of Ivan's sons, the one who was a carpenter visited his family only
occasionally, and at irregular intervals; the bricklayer, on the contrary, as
building is impossible in Russia during the cold weather, spent the greater
part of the winter at home. Both of them paid a large part of their earnings
into the family treasury, over which their father exercised uncontrolled
authority. If he wished to make any considerable outlay, he consulted his
sons on the subject; but as he was a prudent, intelligent man, and enjoyed
the respect and confidence of the family, he never met with any strong
opposition. All the field work was performed by him with the assistance of
his daughters-in-law; only at harvest time he hired one or two labourers to
help him.

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Ivan's household was a good specimen of the Russian peasant family of
the old type. Previous to the Emancipation in 1861 there were many
households of this kind, containing the representatives of three generations.
All the members, young and old, lived together in patriarchal fashion under
the direction and authority of the Head of the House, called usually the
Khozain—that is to say, the Administrator; or, in some districts, the
Bolshak, which means literally "the Big One." Generally speaking, this
important position was occupied by the grandfather, or, if he was dead, by
the eldest brother, but the rule was not very strictly observed. If, for
instance, the grandfather became infirm, or if the eldest brother was
incapacitated by disorderly habits or other cause, the place of authority was
taken by some other member—it might be by a woman—who was a good
manager, and possessed the greatest moral influence.
The relations between the Head of the Household and the other members
depended on custom and personal character, and they consequently varied
greatly in different families. If the Big One was an intelligent man, of
decided, energetic character, like my friend Ivan, there was probably perfect
discipline in the household, except perhaps in the matter of female tongues,
which do not readily submit to the authority even of their owners; but very
often it happened that the Big One was not thoroughly well fitted for his
post, and in that case endless quarrels and bickerings inevitably took place.
Those quarrels were generally caused and fomented by the female members
of the family—a fact which will not seem strange if we try to realise how
difficult it must be for several sisters-in-law to live together, with their
children and a mother-in-law, within the narrow limits of a peasant's
household. The complaints of the young bride, who finds that her mother-
in-law puts all the hard work on her shoulders, form a favourite motive in
the popular poetry.
The house, with its appurtenances, the cattle, the agricultural implements,
the grain and other products, the money gained from the sale of these
products—in a word, the house and nearly everything it contained—were
the joint property of the family. Hence nothing was bought or sold by any
member—not even by the Big One himself, unless he possessed an unusual
amount of authority—without the express or tacit consent of the other
grown-up males, and all the money that was earned was put into the
common purse. When one of the sons left home to work elsewhere, he was
expected to bring or send home all his earnings, except what he required for

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food, lodgings, and other necessary expenses; and if he understood the word
"necessary" in too lax a sense, he had to listen to very plain-spoken
reproaches when he returned. During his absence, which might last for a
whole year or several years, his wife and children remained in the house as
before, and the money which he earned could be devoted to the payment of
the family taxes.
The peasant household of the old type is thus a primitive labour
association, of which the members have all things in common, and it is not
a little remarkable that the peasant conceives it as such rather than as a
family. This is shown by the customary terminology, for the Head of the
Household is not called by any word corresponding to Paterfamilias, but is
termed, as I have said, Khozain, or Administrator—a word that is applied
equally to a farmer, a shopkeeper or the head of an industrial undertaking,
and does not at all convey the idea of blood-relationship. It is likewise
shown by what takes place when a household is broken up. On such
occasions the degree of blood-relationship is not taken into consideration in
the distribution of the property. All the adult male members share equally.
Illegitimate and adopted sons, if they have contributed their share of labour,
have the same rights as the sons born in lawful wedlock. The married
daughter, on the contrary—being regarded as belonging to her husband's
family—and the son who has previously separated himself from the
household, are excluded from the succession. Strictly speaking, the
succession or inheritance is confined to the wearing apparel and any little
personal effects of a deceased member. The house and all that it contains
belong to the little household community; and, consequently, when it is
broken up, by the death of the Khozain or other cause, the members do not
inherit, but merely appropriate individually what they had hitherto
possessed collectively. Thus there is properly no inheritance or succession,
but simply liquidation and distribution of the property among the members.
The written law of inheritance founded on the conception of personal
property, is quite unknown to the peasantry, and quite inapplicable to their
mode of life. In this way a large and most important section of the Code
remains a dead letter for about four-fifths of the population.
This predominance of practical economic considerations is exemplified
also by the way in which marriages are arranged in these large families. In
the primitive system of agriculture usually practised in Russia, the natural
labour-unit—if I may use such a term—comprises a man, a woman, and a

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horse. As soon, therefore, as a boy becomes an able-bodied labourer he
ought to be provided with the two accessories necessary for the completion
of the labour-unit. To procure a horse, either by purchase or by rearing a
foal, is the duty of the Head of the House; to procure a wife for the youth is
the duty of "the female Big One" (Bolshukha). And the chief consideration
in determining the choice is in both cases the same. Prudent domestic
administrators are not to be tempted by showy horses or beautiful brides;
what they seek is not beauty, but physical strength and capacity for work.
When the youth reaches the age of eighteen he is informed that he ought to
marry at once, and as soon as he gives his consent negotiations are opened
with the parents of some eligible young person. In the larger villages the
negotiations are sometimes facilitated by certain old women called svakhi,
who occupy themselves specially with this kind of mediation; but very
often the affair is arranged directly by, or through the agency of, some
common friend of the two houses.
Care must of course be taken that there is no legal obstacle, and these
obstacles are not always easily avoided in a small village, the inhabitants of
which have been long in the habit of intermarrying. According to Russian
ecclesiastical law, not only is marriage between first-cousins illegal, but
affinity is considered as equivalent to consanguinity—that is to say a
mother-in-law and a sister-in-law are regarded as a mother and a sister—
and even the fictitious relationship created by standing together at the
baptismal font as godfather and godmother is legally recognised, and may
constitute a bar to matrimony. If all the preliminary negotiations are
successful, the marriage takes place, and the bridegroom brings his bride
home to the house of which he is a member. She brings nothing with her as
a dowry except her trousseau, but she brings a pair of good strong arms, and
thereby enriches her adopted family. Of course it happens occasionally—for
human nature is everywhere essentially the same—that a young peasant
falls in love with one of his former playmates, and brings his little romance
to a happy conclusion at the altar; but such cases are very rare, and as a rule
it may be said that the marriages of the Russian peasantry are arranged
under the influence of economic rather than sentimental considerations.
The custom of living in large families has many economic advantages.
We all know the edifying fable of the dying man who showed to his sons by
means of a piece of wicker-work the advantages of living together and
assisting each other. In ordinary times the necessary expenses of a large

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household of ten members are considerably less than the combined
expenses of two households comprising five members each, and when a
"black day" comes a large family can bear temporary adversity much more
successfully than a small one. These are principles of world-wide
application, but in the life of the Russian peasantry they have a peculiar
force. Each adult peasant possesses, as I shall hereafter explain, a share of
the Communal land, but this share is not sufficient to occupy all his time
and working power. One married pair can easily cultivate two shares—at
least in all provinces where the peasant allotments are not very large. Now,
if a family is composed of two married couples, one of the men can go
elsewhere and earn money, whilst the other, with his wife and sister-in-law,
can cultivate the two combined shares of land. If, on the contrary a family
consists merely of one pair with their children, the man must either remain
at home—in which case he may have difficulty in finding work for the
whole of his time—or he must leave home, and entrust the cultivation of his
share of the land to his wife, whose time must be in great part devoted to
domestic affairs.
In the time of serfage the proprietors clearly perceived these and similar
advantages, and compelled their serfs to live together in large families. No
family could be broken up without the proprietor's consent, and this consent
was not easily obtained unless the family had assumed quite abnormal
proportions and was permanently disturbed by domestic dissension. In the
matrimonial affairs of the serfs, too, the majority of the proprietors
systematically exercised a certain supervision, not necessarily from any
paltry meddling spirit, but because their own material interests were thereby
affected. A proprietor would not, for instance, allow the daughter of one of
his serfs to marry a serf belonging to another proprietor—because he would
thereby lose a female labourer—unless some compensation were offered.
The compensation might be a sum of money, or the affair might be arranged
on the principle of reciprocity by the master of the bridegroom allowing one
of his female serfs to marry a serf belonging to the master of the bride.
However advantageous the custom of living in large families may appear
when regarded from the economic point of view, it has very serious defects,
both theoretical and practical.
That families connected by the ties of blood-relationship and marriage
can easily live together in harmony is one of those social axioms which are

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accepted universally and believed by nobody. We all know by our own
experience, or by that of others, that the friendly relations of two such
families are greatly endangered by proximity of habitation. To live in the
same street is not advisable; to occupy adjoining houses is positively
dangerous; and to live under the same roof is certainly fatal to prolonged
amity. There may be the very best intentions on both sides, and the
arrangement may be inaugurated by the most gushing expressions of
undying affection and by the discovery of innumerable secret affinities, but
neither affinities, affection, nor good intentions can withstand the constant
friction and occasional jerks which inevitably ensue.
Now the reader must endeavour to realise that Russian peasants, even
when clad in sheep-skins, are human beings like ourselves. Though they are
often represented as abstract entities—as figures in a table of statistics or
dots on a diagram—they have in reality "organs, dimensions, senses,
affections, passions." If not exactly "fed with the same food," they are at
least "hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by
the same means," and liable to be irritated by the same annoyances as we
are. And those of them who live in large families are subjected to a kind of
probation that most of us have never dreamed of. The families comprising a
large household not only live together, but have nearly all things in
common. Each member works, not for himself, but for the household, and
all that he earns is expected to go into the family treasury. The arrangement
almost inevitably leads to one of two results—either there are continual
dissensions, or order is preserved by a powerful domestic tyranny.
It is quite natural, therefore, that when the authority of the landed
proprietors was abolished in 1861, the large peasant families almost all
crumbled to pieces. The arbitrary rule of the Khozain was based on, and
maintained by, the arbitrary rule of the proprietor, and both naturally fell
together. Households like that of our friend Ivan were preserved only in
exceptional cases, where the Head of the House happened to possess an
unusual amount of moral influence over the other members.
This change has unquestionably had a prejudicial influence on the
material welfare of the peasantry, but it must have added considerably to
their domestic comfort, and may perhaps produce good moral results. For
the present, however, the evil consequences are by far the most prominent.
Every married peasant strives to have a house of his own, and many of

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them, in order to defray the necessary expenses, have been obliged to
contract debts. This is a very serious matter. Even if the peasants could
obtain money at five or six per cent., the position of the debtors would be
bad enough, but it is in reality much worse, for the village usurers consider
twenty or twenty-five per cent. a by no means exorbitant rate of interest. A
laudable attempt has been made to remedy this state of things by village
banks, but these have proved successful only in certain exceptional
localities. As a rule the peasant who contracts debts has a hard struggle to
pay the interest in ordinary times, and when some misfortune overtakes him
—when, for instance, the harvest is bad or his horse is stolen—he probably
falls hopelessly into pecuniary embarrassments. I have seen peasants not
specially addicted to drunkenness or other ruinous habits sink to a helpless
state of insolvency. Fortunately for such insolvent debtors, they are treated
by the law with extreme leniency. Their house, their share of the common
land, their agricultural implements, their horse—in a word, all that is
necessary for their subsistence, is exempt from sequestration. The
Commune, however, may bring strong pressure to bear on those who do not
pay their taxes. When I lived among the peasantry in the seventies, corporal
punishment inflicted by order of the Commune was among the means
usually employed; and though the custom was recently prohibited by an
Imperial decree of Nicholas II, I am not at all sure that it has entirely
disappeared.

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CHAPTER VII
THE PEASANTRY OF THE NORTH

Communal Land—System of Agriculture—Parish Fetes—Fasting—
Winter Occupations—Yearly Migrations—Domestic Industries—Influence
of Capital and Wholesale Enterprise—The State Peasants—Serf-dues—
Buckle's "History of Civilisation"—A precocious Yamstchik—"People Who
Play Pranks"—A Midnight Alarm—The Far North.
Ivanofka may be taken as a fair specimen of the villages in the northern
half of the country, and a brief description of its inhabitants will convey a
tolerably correct notion of the northern peasantry in general.
Nearly the whole of the female population, and about one-half of the
male inhabitants, are habitually engaged in cultivating the Communal land,
which comprises about two thousand acres of a light sandy soil. The arable
part of this land is divided into three large fields, each of which is cut up
into long narrow strips. The first field is reserved for the winter grain—that
is to say, rye, which forms, in the shape of black bread, the principal food of
the rural population. In the second are raised oats for the horses, and
buckwheat, which is largely used for food. The third lies fallow, and is used
in the summer as pasturage for the cattle.
All the villagers in this part of the country divide the arable land in this
way, in order to suit the triennial rotation of crops. This triennial system is
extremely simple. The field which is used this year for raising winter grain
will be used next year for raising summer grain, and in the following year
will lie fallow. Before being sown with winter grain it ought to receive a
certain amount of manure. Every family possesses in each of the two fields
under cultivation one or more of the long narrow strips or belts into which
they are divided.
The annual life of the peasantry is that of simple husbandman, inhabiting
a country where the winter is long and severe. The agricultural year begins
in April with the melting of the snow. Nature has been lying dormant for
some months. Awaking now from her long sleep, and throwing off her

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white mantle, she strives to make up for lost time. No sooner has the snow
disappeared than the fresh young grass begins to shoot up, and very soon
afterwards the shrubs and trees begin to bud. The rapidity of this transition
from winter to spring astonishes the inhabitants of more temperate climes.
On St. George's Day (April 23rd*) the cattle are brought out for the first
time, and sprinkled with holy water by the priest. They are never very fat,
but at this period of the year their appearance is truly lamentable. During
the winter they have been cooped up in small unventilated cow-houses, and
fed almost exclusively on straw; now, when they are released from their
imprisonment, they look like the ghosts of their former emaciated selves.
All are lean and weak, many are lame, and some cannot rise to their feet
without assistance.

* With regard to saints' days, I always give the date
according to the old style. To find the date according to
our calendar, thirteen days must be added.

Meanwhile the peasants are impatient to begin the field labour. An old
proverb which they all know says: "Sow in mud and you will be a prince";
and they always act in accordance with this dictate of traditional wisdom.
As soon as it is possible to plough they begin to prepare the land for the
summer grain, and this labour occupies them probably till the end of May.
Then comes the work of carting out manure and preparing the fallow field
for the winter grain, which will last probably till about St. Peter's Day (June
29th), when the hay-making generally begins. After the hay-making comes
the harvest, by far the busiest time of the year. From the middle of July—
especially from St. Elijah's Day (July 20th), when the saint is usually heard
rumbling along the heavens in his chariot of fire*—until the end of August,
the peasant may work day and night, and yet he will find that he has barely
time to get all his work done. In little more than a month he has to reap and
stack his grain—rye, oats, and whatever else he may have sown either in
spring or in the preceding autumn—and to sow the winter grain for next
year. To add to his troubles, it sometimes happens that the rye and the oats
ripen almost simultaneously, and his position is then still more difficult.

* It is thus that the peasants explain the thunder, which is
often heard at that season.

Whether the seasons favour him or not, the peasant has at this time a hard
task, for he can rarely afford to hire the requisite number of labourers, and

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has generally the assistance merely of his wife and family; but he can at this
season work for a short time at high pressure, for he has the prospect of
soon obtaining a good rest and an abundance of food. About the end of
September the field labour is finished, and on the first day of October the
harvest festival begins—a joyous season, during which the parish fetes are
commonly celebrated.
To celebrate a parish fete in true orthodox fashion it is necessary to
prepare beforehand a large quantity of braga—a kind of home-brewed small
beer—and to bake a plentiful supply of piroghi or meat pies. Oil, too, has to
be procured, and vodka (rye spirit) in goodly quantity. At the same time the
big room of the izba, as the peasant's house is called, has to be cleared, the
floor washed, and the table and benches scrubbed. The evening before the
fete, while the piroghi are being baked, a little lamp burns before the Icon in
the corner of the room, and perhaps one or two guests from a distance arrive
in order that they may have on the morrow a full day's enjoyment.
On the morning of the fete the proceedings begin by a long service in the
church, at which all the inhabitants are present in their best holiday
costumes, except those matrons and young women who remain at home to
prepare the dinner. About mid-day dinner is served in each izba for the
family and their friends. In general the Russian peasant's fare is of the
simplest kind, and rarely comprises animal food of any sort—not from any
vegetarian proclivities, but merely because beef, mutton, and pork are too
expensive; but on a holiday, such as a parish fete, there is always on the
dinner table a considerable variety of dishes. In the house of a well-to-do
family there will be not only greasy cabbage-soup and kasha—a dish made
from buckwheat—but also pork, mutton, and perhaps even beef. Braga will
be supplied in unlimited quantities, and more than once vodka will be
handed round. When the repast is finished, all rise together, and, turning
towards the Icon in the corner, bow and cross themselves repeatedly. The
guests then say to their host, "Spasibo za khelb za sol"—that is to say,
"Thanks for your hospitality," or more literally, "Thanks for bread and salt";
and the host replies, "Do not be displeased, sit down once more for good
luck"—or perhaps he puts the last part of his request into the form of a
rhyming couplet to the following effect: "Sit down, that the hens may
brood, and that the chickens and bees may multiply!" All obey this request,
and there is another round of vodka.

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After dinner some stroll about, chatting with their friends, or go to sleep
in some shady nook, whilst those who wish to make merry go to the spot
where the young people are singing, playing, and amusing themselves in
various ways. As the sun sinks towards the horizon, the more grave, staid
guests wend their way homewards, but many remain for supper; and as
evening advances the effects of the vodka become more and more apparent.
Sounds of revelry are heard more frequently from the houses, and a large
proportion of the inhabitants and guests appear on the road in various
degrees of intoxication. Some of these vow eternal affection to their friends,
or with flaccid gestures and in incoherent tones harangue invisible
audiences; others stagger about aimlessly in besotted self-contentment, till
they drop down in a state of complete unconsciousness. There they will lie
tranquilly till they are picked up by their less intoxicated friends, or more
probably till they awake of their own accord next morning.
As a whole, a village fete in Russia is a saddening spectacle. It affords a
new proof—where, alas! no new proof was required—that we northern
nations, who know so well how to work, have not yet learned the art of
amusing ourselves.
If the Russian peasant's food were always as good and plentiful as at this
season of the year, he would have little reason to complain; but this is by no
means the case. Gradually, as the harvest-time recedes, it deteriorates in
quality, and sometimes diminishes in quantity. Besides this, during a great
part of the year the peasant is prevented, by the rules of the Church, from
using much that he possesses.
In southern climes, where these rules were elaborated and first practised,
the prescribed fasts are perhaps useful not only in a religious, but also in a
sanitary sense. Having abundance of fruit and vegetables, the inhabitants do
well to abstain occasionally from animal food. But in countries like
Northern and Central Russia the influence of these rules is very different.
The Russian peasant cannot get as much animal food as he requires, whilst
sour cabbage and cucumbers are probably the only vegetables he can
procure, and fruit of any kind is for him an unattainable luxury. Under these
circumstances, abstinence from eggs and milk in all their forms during
several months of the year seems to the secular mind a superfluous bit of
asceticism. If the Church would direct her maternal solicitude to the
peasant's drinking, and leave him to eat what he pleases, she might exercise

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a beneficial influence on his material and moral welfare. Unfortunately she
has a great deal too much inherent immobility to attempt anything of the
kind, so the muzhik, while free to drink copiously whenever he gets the
chance, must fast during the seven weeks of Lent, during two or three
weeks in June, from the beginning of November till Christmas, and on all
Wednesdays and Fridays during the remainder of the year.
From the festival time till the following spring there is no possibility of
doing any agricultural work, for the ground is hard as iron, and covered
with a deep layer of snow. The male peasants, therefore, who remain in the
villages, have very little to do, and may spend the greater part of their time
in lying idly on the stove, unless they happen to have learned some
handicraft that can be practised at home. Formerly, many of them were
employed in transporting the grain to the market town, which might be
several hundred miles distant; but now this species of occupation has been
greatly diminished by the extension of railways.
Another winter occupation which was formerly practised, and has now
almost fallen into disuse, was that of stealing wood in the forest. This was,
according to peasant morality, no sin, or at most a very venial offence, for
God plants and waters the trees, and therefore forests belong properly to no
one. So thought the peasantry, but the landed proprietors and the
Administration of the Domains held a different theory of property, and
consequently precautions had to be taken to avoid detection. In order to
ensure success it was necessary to choose a night when there was a violent
snowstorm, which would immediately obliterate all traces of the expedition;
and when such a night was found, the operation was commonly performed
with success. During the hours of darkness a tree would be felled, stripped
of its branches, dragged into the village, and cut up into firewood, and at
sunrise the actors would be tranquilly sleeping on the stove as if they had
spent the night at home. In recent years the judicial authorities have done
much towards putting down this practice and eradicating the loose
conceptions of property with which it was connected.
For the female part of the population the winter used to be a busy time,
for it was during these four or five months that the spinning and weaving
had to be done, but now the big factories, with their cheap methods of
production, are rapidly killing the home industries, and the young girls are

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not learning to work at the jenny and the loom as their mothers and
grandmothers did.
In many of the northern villages, where ancient usages happen to be
preserved, the tedium of the long winter evenings is relieved by so-called
Besedy, a word which signifies literally conversazioni. A Beseda, however,
is not exactly a conversazione as we understand the term, but resembles
rather what is by some ladies called a Dorcas meeting, with this essential
difference, that those present work for themselves and not for any
benevolent purposes. In some villages as many as three Besedy regularly
assemble about sunset; one for the children, the second for the young
people, and the third for the matrons. Each of the three has its peculiar
character. In the first, the children work and amuse themselves under the
superintendence of an old woman, who trims the torch* and endeavours to
keep order. The little girls spin flax in a primitive way without the aid of a
jenny, and the boys, who are, on the whole, much less industrious, make
simple bits of wicker-work. Formerly—I mean within my own recollection
—many of them used to make rude shoes of plaited bark, called lapty, but
these are being rapidly supplanted by leather boots. These occupations do
not prevent an almost incessant hum of talk, frequent discordant attempts to
sing in chorus, and occasional quarrels requiring the energetic interference
of the old woman who controls the proceedings. To amuse her noisy flock
she sometimes relates to them, for the hundredth time, one of those
wonderful old stories that lose nothing by repetition, and all listen to her
attentively, as if they had never heard the story before.

* The torch (lutchina) has now almost entirely disappeared
and been replaced by the petroleum lamp.

The second Beseda is held in another house by the young people of a
riper age. Here the workers are naturally more staid, less given to
quarrelling, sing more in harmony, and require no one to look after them.
Some people, however, might think that a chaperon or inspector of some
kind would be by no means out of place, for a good deal of flirtation goes
on, and if village scandal is to be trusted, strict propriety in thought, word,
and deed is not always observed. How far these reports are true I cannot
pretend to say, for the presence of a stranger always acts on the company
like the presence of a severe inspector. In the third Beseda there is always at
least strict decorum. Here the married women work together and talk about

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their domestic concerns, enlivening the conversation occasionally by the
introduction of little bits of village scandal.
Such is the ordinary life of the peasants who live by agriculture; but
many of the villagers live occasionally or permanently in the towns.
Probably the majority of the peasants in this region have at some period of
their lives gained a living elsewhere. Many of the absentees spend yearly a
few months at home, whilst others visit their families only occasionally,
and, it may be, at long intervals. In no case, however, do they sever their
connection with their native village. Even the peasant who becomes a rich
merchant and settles permanently with his family in Moscow or St.
Petersburg remains probably a member of the Village Commune, and pays
his share of the taxes, though he does not enjoy any of the corresponding
privileges. Once I remember asking a rich man of this kind, the proprietor
of several large houses in St. Petersburg, why he did not free himself from
all connection with his native Commune, with which he had no longer any
interests in common. His answer was, "It is all very well to be free, and I
don't want anything from the Commune now; but my old father lives there,
my mother is buried there, and I like to go back to the old place sometimes.
Besides, I have children, and our affairs are commercial (nashe dyelo
torgovoe). Who knows but my children may be very glad some day to have
a share of the Commune land?"
In respect to these non-agricultural occupations, each district has its
specialty. The province of Yaroslavl, for instance, supplies the large towns
with waiters for the traktirs, or lower class of restaurants, whilst the best
hotels in Petersburg are supplied by the Tartars of Kasimof, celebrated for
their sobriety and honesty. One part of the province of Kostroma has a
special reputation for producing carpenters and stove-builders, whilst
another part, as I once discovered to my surprise, sends yearly to Siberia—
not as convicts, but as free laborours—a large contingent of tailors and
workers in felt! On questioning some youngsters who were accompanying
as apprentices one of these bands, I was informed by a bright-eyed youth of
about sixteen that he had already made the journey twice, and intended to
go every winter. "And you always bring home a big pile of money with
you?" I inquired. "Nitchevo!" replied the little fellow, gaily, with an air of
pride and self-confidence; "last year I brought home three roubles!" This
answer was, at the moment, not altogether welcome, for I had just been
discussing with a Russian fellow-traveller as to whether the peasantry can

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fairly be called industrious, and the boy's reply enabled my antagonist to
score a point against me. "You hear that!" he said, triumphantly. "A Russian
peasant goes all the way to Siberia and back for three roubles! Could you
get an Englishman to work at that rate?" "Perhaps not," I replied, evasively,
thinking at the same time that if a youth were sent several times from
Land's End to John o' Groat's House, and obliged to make the greater part of
the journey in carts or on foot, he would probably expect, by way of
remuneration for the time and labour expended, rather more than seven and
sixpence!
Very often the peasants find industrial occupations without leaving home,
for various industries which do not require complicated machinery are
practised in the villages by the peasants and their families. Wooden vessels,
wrought iron, pottery, leather, rush-matting, and numerous other articles are
thus produced in enormous quantities. Occasionally we find not only a
whole village, but even a whole district occupied almost exclusively with
some one kind of manual industry. In the province of Vladimir, for
example, a large group of villages live by Icon-painting; in one locality near
Nizhni-Novgorod nineteen villages are occupied with the manufacture of
axes; round about Pavlovo, in the same province, eighty villages produce
almost nothing but cutlery; and in a locality called Ouloma, on the borders
of Novgorod and Tver, no less than two hundred villages live by nail-
making.
These domestic industries have long existed, and were formerly an
abundant source of revenue—providing a certain compensation for the
poverty of the soil. But at present they are in a very critical position. They
belong to the primitive period of economic development, and that period in
Russia, as I shall explain in a future chapter, is now rapidly drawing to a
close. Formerly the Head of a Household bought the raw material, had it
worked up at home, and sold with a reasonable profit the manufactured
articles at the bazaars, as the local fairs are called, or perhaps at the great
annual yarmarkt* of Nizhni-Novgorod. This primitive system is now
rapidly becoming obsolete. Capital and wholesale enterprise have come into
the field and are revolutionising the old methods of production and trade.
Already whole groups of industrial villages have fallen under the power of
middle-men, who advance money to the working households and fix the
price of the products. Attempts are frequently made to break their power by
voluntary co-operative associations, organised by the local authorities or

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benevolent landed proprietors of the neighbourhood—like the benevolent
people in England who try to preserve the traditional cottage industries—
and some of the associations work very well; but the ultimate success of
such "efforts to stem the current of capitalism" is extremely doubtful. At the
same time, the periodical bazaars and yarmarki, at which producers and
consumers transacted their affairs without mediation, are being replaced by
permanent stores and by various classes of tradesmen—wholesale and
retail.

* This term is a corruption of the German word Jahrmarkt.

To the political economist of the rigidly orthodox school this important
change may afford great satisfaction. According to his theories it is a
gigantic step in the right direction, and must necessarily redound to the
advantage of all parties concerned. The producer now receives a regular
supply of raw material, and regularly disposes of the articles manufactured;
and the time and trouble which he formerly devoted to wandering about in
search of customers he can now employ more profitably in productive
work. The creation of a class between the producers and the consumers is
an important step towards that division and specialisation of labour which is
a necessary condition of industrial and commercial prosperity. The
consumer no longer requires to go on a fixed day to some distant point, on
the chance of finding there what he requires, but can always buy what he
pleases in the permanent stores. Above all, the production is greatly
increased in amount, and the price of manufactured goods is proportionally
lessened.
All this seems clear enough in theory, and any one who values
intellectual tranquillity will feel disposed to accept this view of the case
without questioning its accuracy; but the unfortunate traveller who is
obliged to use his eyes as well as his logical faculties may find some little
difficulty in making the facts fit into the a priori formula. Far be it from me
to question the wisdom of political economists, but I cannot refrain from
remarking that of the three classes concerned—small producers, middle-
men, and consumers—two fail to perceive and appreciate the benefits
which have been conferred upon them. The small producers complain that
on the new system they work more and gain less; and the consumers
complain that the manufactured articles, if cheaper and more showy in
appearance, are far inferior in quality. The middlemen, who are accused,

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rightly or wrongly, of taking for themselves the lion's share of the profits,
alone seem satisfied with the new arrangement.
Interesting as this question undoubtedly is, it is not of permanent
importance, because the present state of things is merely transitory. Though
the peasants may continue for a time to work at home for the wholesale
dealers, they cannot in the long run compete with the big factories and
workshops, organised on the European model with steam-power and
complicated machinery, which already exist in many provinces. Once a
country has begun to move forward on the great highway of economic
progress, there is no possibility of stopping halfway.
Here again the orthodox economists find reason for congratulation,
because big factories and workshops are the cheapest and most productive
form of manufacturing industry; and again, the observant traveller cannot
shut his eyes to ugly facts which force themselves on his attention. He
notices that this cheapest and most productive form of manufacturing
industry does not seem to advance the material and moral welfare of the
population. Nowhere is there more disease, drunkenness, demoralisation
and misery than in the manufacturing districts.
The reader must not imagine that in making these statements I wish to
calumniate the spirit of modern enterprise, or to advocate a return to
primitive barbarism. All great changes produce a mixture of good and evil,
and at first the evil is pretty sure to come prominently forward. Russia is at
this moment in a state of transition, and the new condition of things is not
yet properly organised. With improved organisation many of the existing
evils will disappear. Already in recent years I have noticed sporadic signs of
improvement. When factories were first established no proper arrangements
were made for housing and feeding the workmen, and the consequent
hardships were specially felt when the factories were founded, as is often
the case, in rural districts. Now, the richer and more enterprising
manufacturers build large barracks for the workmen and their families, and
provide them with common kitchens, wash-houses, steam-baths, schools,
and similar requisites of civilised life. At the same time the Government
appoints inspectors to superintend the sanitary arrangements and see that
the health and comfort of the workers are properly attended to.
On the whole we must assume that the activity of these inspectors tends
to improve the condition of the working-classes. Certainly in some

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instances it has that effect. I remember, for example, some thirty years ago,
visiting a lucifer-match factory in which the hands employed worked
habitually in an atmosphere impregnated with the fumes of phosphorus,
which produce insidious and very painful diseases. Such a thing is hardly
possible nowadays. On the other hand, official inspection, like Factory Acts,
everywhere gives rise to a good deal of dissatisfaction and does not always
improve the relations between employers and employed. Some of the
Russian inspectors, if I may credit the testimony of employers, are young
gentlemen imbued with socialist notions, who intentionally stir up
discontent or who make mischief from inexperience. An amusing
illustration of the current complaints came under my notice when, in 1903, I
was visiting a landed proprietor of the southern provinces, who has a large
sugar factory on his estate. The inspector objected to the traditional custom
of the men sleeping in large dormitories and insisted on sleeping-cots being
constructed for them individually. As soon as the change was made the
workmen came to the proprietor to complain, and put their grievance in an
interrogative form: "Are we cattle that we should be thus couped up in
stalls?"
To return to the northern agricultural region, the rural population have a
peculiar type, which is to be accounted for by the fact that they never
experienced to its full extent the demoralising influence of serfage. A large
proportion of them were settled on State domains and were governed by a
special branch of the Imperial administration, whilst others lived on the
estates of rich absentee landlords, who were in the habit of leaving the
management of their properties to a steward acting under a code of
instructions. In either case, though serfs in the eye of the law, they enjoyed
practically a very large amount of liberty. By paying a small sum for a
passport they could leave their villages for an indefinite period, and as long
as they sent home regularly the money required for taxes and dues, they
were in little danger of being molested. Many of them, though officially
inscribed as domiciled in their native communes, lived permanently in the
towns, and not a few succeeded in amassing large fortunes. The effect of
this comparative freedom is apparent even at the present day. These
peasants of the north are more energetic, more intelligent, more
independent, and consequently less docile and pliable than those of the
fertile central provinces. They have, too, more education. A large proportion
of them can read and write, and occasionally one meets among them men

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who have a keen desire for knowledge. Several times I encountered
peasants in this region who had a small collection of books, and twice I
found in such collections, much to my astonishment, a Russian translation
of Buckle's "History of Civilisation."
How, it may be asked, did a work of this sort find its way to such a place?
If the reader will pardon a short digression, I shall explain the fact.
Immediately after the Crimean War there was a curious intellectual
movement—of which I shall have more to say hereafter—among the
Russian educated classes. The movement assumed various forms, of which
two of the most prominent were a desire for encyclopaedic knowledge, and
an attempt to reduce all knowledge to a scientific form. For men in this state
of mind Buckle's great work had naturally a powerful fascination. It seemed
at first sight to reduce the multifarious conflicting facts of human history to
a few simple principles, and to evolve order out of chaos. Its success,
therefore, was great. In the course of a few years no less than four
independent translations were published and sold. Every one read, or at
least professed to have read, the wonderful book, and many believed that its
author was the greatest genius of his time. During the first year of my
residence in Russia (1870), I rarely had a serious conversation without
hearing Buckle's name mentioned; and my friends almost always assumed
that he had succeeded in creating a genuine science of history on the
inductive method. In vain I pointed out that Buckle had merely thrown out
some hints in his introductory chapter as to how such a science ought to be
constructed, and that he had himself made no serious attempt to use the
method which he commended. My objections had little or no effect: the
belief was too deep-rooted to be so easily eradicated. In books, periodicals,
newspapers, and professional lectures the name of Buckle was constantly
cited—often violently dragged in without the slightest reason—and the
cheap translations of his work were sold in enormous quantities. It is not,
then, so very wonderful after all that the book should have found its way to
two villages in the province of Yaroslavl.
The enterprising, self-reliant, independent spirit which is often to be
found among those peasants manifests itself occasionally in amusing forms
among the young generation. Often in this part of the country I have
encountered boys who recalled young America rather than young Russia.
One of these young hopefuls I remember well. I was waiting at a post-

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station for the horses to be changed, when he appeared before me in a
sheep-skin, fur cap, and gigantic double-soled boots—all of which articles
had been made on a scale adapted to future rather than actual requirements.
He must have stood in his boots about three feet eight inches, and he could
not have been more than twelve years of age; but he had already learned to
look upon life as a serious business, wore a commanding air, and knitted his
innocent little brows as if the cares of an empire weighed on his diminutive
shoulders. Though he was to act as yamstchik he had to leave the putting in
of the horses to larger specimens of the human species, but he took care that
all was done properly. Putting one of his big boots a little in advance, and
drawing himself up to his full shortness, he watched the operation
attentively, as if the smallness of his stature had nothing to do with his
inactivity. When all was ready, he climbed up to his seat, and at a signal
from the station-keeper, who watched with paternal pride all the movements
of the little prodigy, we dashed off at a pace rarely attained by post-horses.
He had the faculty of emitting a peculiar sound—something between a
whirr and a whistle—that appeared to have a magical effect on the team and
every few minutes he employed this incentive. The road was rough, and at
every jolt he was shot upwards into the air, but he always fell back into his
proper position, and never lost for a moment his self-possession or his
balance. At the end of the journey I found we had made nearly fourteen
miles within the hour.
Unfortunately this energetic, enterprising spirit sometimes takes an
illegitimate direction. Not only whole villages, but even whole districts,
have in this way acquired a bad reputation for robbery, the manufacture of
paper-money, and similar offences against the criminal law. In popular
parlance, these localities are said to contain "people who play pranks"
(narod shalit). I must, however, remark that, if I may judge by my own
experience, these so-called "playful" tendencies are greatly exaggerated.
Though I have travelled hundreds of miles at night on lonely roads, I was
never robbed or in any way molested. Once, indeed, when travelling at
night in a tarantass, I discovered on awaking that my driver was bending
over me, and had introduced his hand into one of my pockets; but the
incident ended without serious consequences. When I caught the delinquent
hand, and demanded an explanation from the owner, he replied, in an
apologetic, caressing tone, that the night was cold, and he wished to warm
his fingers; and when I advised him to use for that purpose his own pockets

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rather than mine, he promised to act in future according to my advice. More
than once, it is true, I believed that I was in danger of being attacked, but on
every occasion my fears turned out to be unfounded, and sometimes the
catastrophe was ludicrous rather than tragical. Let the following serve as an
illustration.
I had occasion to traverse, in company with a Russian friend, the country
lying to the east of the river Vetluga—a land of forest and morass, with here
and there a patch of cultivation. The majority of the population are
Tcheremiss, a Finnish tribe; but near the banks of the river there are villages
of Russian peasants, and these latter have the reputation of "playing
pranks." When we were on the point of starting from Kozmodemiansk a
town on the bank of the Volga, we received a visit from an officer of rural
police, who painted in very sombre colours the habits and moral character
—or, more properly, immoral character—of the people whose acquaintance
we were about to make. He related with melodramatic gesticulation his
encounters with malefactors belonging to the villages through which we
had to pass, and ended the interview with a strong recommendation to us
not to travel at night, and to keep at all times our eyes open and our revolver
ready. The effect of his narrative was considerably diminished by the
prominence of the moral, which was to the effect that there never had been
a police-officer who had shown so much zeal, energy, and courage in the
discharge of his duty as the worthy man before us. We considered it,
however, advisable to remember his hint about keeping our eyes open.
In spite of our intention of being very cautious, it was already dark when
we arrived at the village which was to be our halting-place for the night,
and it seemed at first as if we should be obliged to spend the night in the
open air. The inhabitants had already retired to rest, and refused to open
their doors to unknown travellers. At length an old woman, more hospitable
than her neighbours, or more anxious to earn an honest penny, consented to
let us pass the night in an outer apartment (seni), and this permission we
gladly accepted. Mindful of the warnings of the police officer, we
barricaded the two doors and the window, and the precaution was evidently
not superfluous, for almost as soon as the light was extinguished we could
hear that an attempt was being made stealthily to effect an entrance.
Notwithstanding my efforts to remain awake, and on the watch, I at last fell
asleep, and was suddenly aroused by some one grasping me tightly by the
arm. Instantly I sprang to my feet and endeavoured to close with my

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invisible assailant. In vain! He dexterously eluded my grasp, and I stumbled
over my portmanteau, which was lying on the floor; but my prompt action
revealed who the intruder was, by producing a wild flutter and a frantic
cackling! Before my companion could strike a light the mysterious attack
was fully explained. The supposed midnight robber and possible assassin
was simply a peaceable hen that had gone to roost on my arm, and, on
finding her position unsteady, had dug her claws into what she mistook for
a roosting-pole!
When speaking of the peasantry of the north I have hitherto had in view
the inhabitants of the provinces of Old-Novgorod, Tver, Yaroslavl, Nizhni-
Novgorod, Kostroma, Kazan, and Viatka, and I have founded my remarks
chiefly on information collected on the spot. Beyond this lies what may be
called the Far North. Though I cannot profess to have the same personal
acquaintance with the peasantry of that region, I may perhaps be allowed to
insert here some information regarding them which I collected from various
trustworthy sources.
If we draw a wavy line eastward from a point a little to the north of St.
Petersburg, as is shown in the map facing page 1 of this volume, we shall
have between that line and the Polar Ocean what may be regarded as a
distinct, peculiar region, differing in many respects from the rest of Russia.
Throughout the whole of it the climate is very severe. For about half of the
year the ground is covered by deep snow, and the rivers are frozen. By far
the greater part of the land is occupied by forests of pine, fir, larch, and
birch, or by vast, unfathomable morasses. The arable land and pasturage
taken together form only about one and a half per cent, of the area. The
population is scarce—little more than one to the English square mile—and
settled chiefly along the banks of the rivers. The peasantry support
themselves by fishing, hunting, felling and floating timber, preparing tar
and charcoal, cattle-breeding, and, in the extreme north, breeding reindeer.
These are their chief occupations, but the people do not entirely neglect
agriculture. They make the most of their short summer by means of a
peculiar and ingenious mode of farming, well adapted to the peculiar local
conditions. The peasant knows of course nothing about agronomical
chemistry, but he, as well as his forefathers, have observed that if wood be
burnt on a field, and the ashes be mixed with the soil, a good harvest may
be confidently expected. On this simple principle his system of farming is

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based. When spring comes round and the leaves begin to appear on the
trees, a band of peasants, armed with their hatchets, proceed to some spot in
the woods previously fixed upon. Here they begin to make a clearing. This
is no easy matter, for tree-felling is hard and tedious work; but the process
does not take so much time as might be expected, for the workmen have
been brought up to the trade, and wield their axes with marvellous dexterity.
When they have felled all the trees, great and small, they return to their
homes, and think no more about their clearing till the autumn, when they
return, in order to strip the fallen trees of the branches, to pick out what they
require for building purposes or firewood, and to pile up the remainder in
heaps. The logs for building or firewood are dragged away by horses as
soon as the first fall of snow has made a good slippery road, but the piles
are allowed to remain till the following spring, when they are stirred up
with long poles and ignited. The flames rapidly spread in all directions till
they join together and form a gigantic bonfire, such as is never seen in more
densely-populated countries. If the fire does its work properly, the whole of
the space is covered with a layer of ashes; and when these have been
slightly mixed with soil by means of a light plough, the seed is sown.
On the field prepared in this original fashion is sown barley, rye, or flax,
and the harvests, nearly always good, sometimes border on the miraculous.
Barley or rye may be expected to produce about sixfold in ordinary years,
and they may produce as much as thirty-fold under peculiarly favourable
circumstances. The fertility is, however, short-lived. If the soil is poor and
stony, not more than two crops can be raised; if it is of a better quality, it
may give tolerable harvests for six or seven successive years. In most
countries this would be an absurdly expensive way of manuring, for wood
is much too valuable a commodity to be used for such a purpose; but in this
northern region the forests are boundless, and in the districts where there is
no river or stream by which timber may be floated, the trees not used in this
way rot from old age. Under these circumstances the system is reasonable,
but it must be admitted that it does not give a very large return for the
amount of labour expended, and in bad seasons it gives almost no return at
all.
The other sources of revenue are scarcely less precarious. With his gun
and a little parcel of provisions the peasant wanders about in the trackless
forests, and too often returns after many days with a very light bag; or he
starts in autumn for some distant lake, and comes back after five or six

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weeks with nothing better than perch and pike. Sometimes he tries his luck
at deep-sea fishing. In this case he starts in February—probably on foot—
for Kem, on the shore of the White Sea, or perhaps for the more distant
Kola, situated on a small river which falls into the Arctic Ocean. There, in
company with three or four comrades, he starts on a fishing cruise along the
Murman coast, or, it may be, off the coast of Spitzbergen. His gains will
depend on the amount caught, for it is a joint-venture; but in no case can
they be very great, for three-fourths of the fish brought into port belongs to
the owner of the craft and tackle. Of the sum realised, he brings home
perhaps only a small part, for he has a strong temptation to buy rum, tea,
and other luxuries, which are very dear in those northern latitudes. If the
fishing is good and he resists temptation, he may save as much as 100
roubles—about 10 pounds—and thereby live comfortably all winter; but if
the fishing season is bad, he may find himself at the end of it not only with
empty pockets, but in debt to the owner of the boat. This debt he may pay
off, if he has a horse, by transporting the dried fish to Kargopol, St.
Petersburg, or some other market.
It is here in the Far North that the ancient folk-lore—popular songs,
stories, and fragments of epic poetry—has been best preserved; but this is a
field on which I need not enter, for the reader can easily find all that he may
desire to know on the subject in the brilliant writings of M. Rambaud and
the very interesting, conscientious works of the late Mr. Ralston,* which
enjoy a high reputation in Russia.

* Rambaud, "La Russie Epique," Paris, 1876; Ralston, "The
Songs of the Russian People," London, 1872; and "Russian
Folk-tales," London, 1873.

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Page 137

CHAPTER VIII
THE MIR, OR VILLAGE COMMUNITY

Social and Political Importance of the Mir—The Mir and the Family
Compared—Theory of the Communal System—Practical Deviations from
the Theory—The Mir a Good Specimen of Constitutional Government of
the Extreme Democratic Type—The Village Assembly—Female Members
—The Elections—Distribution of the Communal Land.
When I had gained a clear notion of the family-life and occupations of
the peasantry, I turned my attention to the constitution of the village. This
was a subject which specially interested me, because I was aware that the
Mir is the most peculiar of Russian institutions. Long before visiting Russia
I had looked into Haxthausen's celebrated work, by which the peculiarities
of the Russian village system were first made known to Western Europe,
and during my stay in St. Petersburg I had often been informed by
intelligent, educated Russians that the rural Commune presented a practical
solution of many difficult social problems with which the philosophers and
statesmen of the West had long been vainly struggling. "The nations of the
West"—such was the substance of innumerable discourses which I had
heard—"are at present on the high-road to political and social anarchy, and
England has the unenviable distinction of being foremost in the race. The
natural increase of population, together with the expropriation of the small
landholders by the great landed proprietors, has created a dangerous and
ever-increasing Proletariat—a great disorganised mass of human beings,
without homes, without permanent domicile, without property of any kind,
without any stake in the existing institutions. Part of these gain a miserable
pittance as agricultural labourers, and live in a condition infinitely worse
than serfage. The others have been forever uprooted from the soil, and have
collected in the large towns, where they earn a precarious living in the
factories and workshops, or swell the ranks of the criminal classes. In
England you have no longer a peasantry in the proper sense of the term, and
unless some radical measures be very soon adopted, you will never be able
to create such a class, for men who have been long exposed to the

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unwholesome influences of town life are physically and morally incapable
of becoming agriculturists.
"Hitherto," the disquisition proceeded, "England has enjoyed, in
consequence of her geographical position, her political freedom, and her
vast natural deposits of coal and iron, a wholly exceptional position in the
industrial world. Fearing no competition, she has proclaimed the principles
of Free Trade, and has inundated the world with her manufactures—using
unscrupulously her powerful navy and all the other forces at her command
for breaking down every barrier tending to check the flood sent forth from
Manchester and Birmingham. In that way her hungry Proletariat has been
fed. But the industrial supremacy of England is drawing to a close. The
nations have discovered the perfidious fallacy of Free-Trade principles, and
are now learning to manufacture for their own wants, instead of paying
England enormous sums to manufacture for them. Very soon English goods
will no longer find foreign markets, and how will the hungry Proletariat
then be fed? Already the grain production of England is far from sufficient
for the wants of the population, so that, even when the harvest is
exceptionally abundant, enormous quantities of wheat are imported from all
quarters of the globe. Hitherto this grain has been paid for by the
manufactured goods annually exported, but how will it be procured when
these goods are no longer wanted by foreign consumers? And what then
will the hungry Proletariat do?"*

* This passage was written, precisely as it stands, long
before the fiscal question was raised by Mr. Chamberlain.
It will be found in the first edition of this work,
published in 1877. (Vol. I., pp. 179-81.)

This sombre picture of England's future had often been presented to me,
and on nearly every occasion I had been assured that Russia had been saved
from these terrible evils by the rural Commune—an institution which, in
spite of its simplicity and incalculable utility, West Europeans seemed
utterly incapable of understanding and appreciating.
The reader will now easily conceive with what interest I took to studying
this wonderful institution, and with what energy I prosecuted my
researches. An institution which professes to solve satisfactorily the most
difficult social problems of the future is not to be met with every day, even
in Russia, which is specially rich in material for the student of social
science.

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On my arrival at Ivanofka my knowledge of the institution was of that
vague, superficial kind which is commonly derived from men who are
fonder of sweeping generalisations and rhetorical declamation than of
serious, patient study of phenomena. I knew that the chief personage in a
Russian village is the Selski Starosta, or Village Elder, and that all
important Communal affairs are regulated by the Selski Skhod, or Village
Assembly. Further, I was aware that the land in the vicinity of the village
belongs to the Commune, and is distributed periodically among the
members in such a way that every able-bodied peasant possesses a share
sufficient, or nearly sufficient, for his maintenance. Beyond this elementary
information I knew little or nothing.
My first attempt at extending my knowledge was not very successful.
Hoping that my friend Ivan might be able to assist me, and knowing that the
popular name for the Commune is Mir, which means also "the world," I put
to him the direct, simple question, "What is the Mir?"
Ivan was not easily disconcerted, but for once he looked puzzled, and
stared at me vacantly. When I endeavoured to explain to him my question,
he simply knitted his brows and scratched the back of his head. This latter
movement is the Russian peasant's method of accelerating cerebral action;
but in the present instance it had no practical result. In spite of his efforts,
Ivan could not get much further than the "Kak vam skazat'?" that is to say,
"How am I to tell you?"
It was not difficult to perceive that I had adopted an utterly false method
of investigation, and a moment's reflection sufficed to show me the
absurdity of my question. I had asked from an uneducated man a
philosophical definition, instead of extracting from him material in the form
of concrete facts, and constructing therefrom a definition for myself. These
concrete facts Ivan was both able and willing to supply; and as soon as I
adopted a rational mode of questioning, I obtained from him all I wanted.
The information he gave me, together with the results of much subsequent
conversation and reading, I now propose to present to the reader in my own
words.
The peasant family of the old type is, as we have just seen, a kind of
primitive association in which the members have nearly all things in
common. The village may be roughly described as a primitive association
on a larger scale.

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Between these two social units there are many points of analogy. In both
there are common interests and common responsibilities. In both there is a
principal personage, who is in a certain sense ruler within and
representative as regards the outside world: in the one case called Khozain,
or Head of the Household, and in the other Starosta, or Village Elder. In
both the authority of the ruler is limited: in the one case by the adult
members of the family, and in the other by the Heads of Households. In
both there is a certain amount of common property: in the one case the
house and nearly all that it contains, and in the other the arable land and
possibly a little pasturage. In both cases there is a certain amount of
common responsibility: in the one case for all the debts, and in the other for
all the taxes and Communal obligations. And both are protected to a certain
extent against the ordinary legal consequences of insolvency, for the family
cannot be deprived of its house or necessary agricultural implements, and
the Commune cannot be deprived of its land, by importunate creditors.
On the other hand, there are many important points of contrast. The
Commune is, of course, much larger than the family, and the mutual
relations of its members are by no means so closely interwoven. The
members of a family all farm together, and those of them who earn money
from other sources are expected to put their savings into the common purse;
whilst the households composing a Commune farm independently, and pay
into the common treasury only a certain fixed sum.
From these brief remarks the reader will at once perceive that a Russian
village is something very different from a village in our sense of the term,
and that the villagers are bound together by ties quite unknown to the
English rural population. A family living in an English village has little
reason to take an interest in the affairs of its neighbours. The isolation of the
individual families is never quite perfect, for man, being a social animal,
takes necessarily a certain interest in the affairs of those around him, and
this social duty is sometimes fulfilled by the weaker sex with more zeal
than is absolutely indispensable for the public welfare; but families may
live for many years in the same village without ever becoming conscious of
common interests. So long as the Jones family do not commit any culpable
breach of public order, such as putting obstructions on the highway or
habitually setting their house on fire, their neighbour Brown takes probably
no interest in their affairs, and has no ground for interfering with their
perfect liberty of action. Amongst the families composing a Russian village,

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such a state of isolation is impossible. The Heads of Households must often
meet together and consult in the Village Assembly, and their daily
occupation must be influenced by the Communal decrees. They cannot
begin to mow the hay or plough the fallow field until the Village Assembly
has passed a resolution on the subject. If a peasant becomes a drunkard, or
takes some equally efficient means to become insolvent, every family in the
village has a right to complain, not merely in the interests of public
morality, but from selfish motives, because all the families are collectively
responsible for his taxes.* For the same reason no peasant can permanently
leave the village without the consent of the Commune, and this consent will
not be granted until the applicant gives satisfactory security for the
fulfilment of his actual and future liabilities. If a peasant wishes to go away
for a short time, in order to work elsewhere, he must obtain a written
permission, which serves him as a passport during his absence; and he may
be recalled at any moment by a Communal decree. In reality he is rarely
recalled so long as he sends home regularly the full amount of his taxes—
including the dues which he has to pay for the temporary passport—but
sometimes the Commune uses the power of recall for purposes of extortion.
If it becomes known, for instance, that an absent member is receiving a
good salary or otherwise making money, he may one day receive a formal
order to return at once to his native village, but he is probably informed at
the same time, unofficially, that his presence will be dispensed with if he
will send to the Commune a certain specified sum. The money thus sent is
generally used by the Commune for convivial purposes. **

* This common responsibility for the taxes was abolished in
1903 by the Emperor, on the advice of M. Witte, and the
other Communal fetters are being gradually relaxed. A
peasant may now, if he wishes, cease to be a member of the
Commune altogether, as soon as he has defrayed all his
outstanding obligations.

** With the recent relaxing of the Communal fetters,
referred to in the foregoing note, this abuse should
disappear.

In all countries the theory of government and administration differs
considerably from the actual practice. Nowhere is this difference greater
than in Russia, and in no Russian institution is it greater than in the Village
Commune. It is necessary, therefore, to know both theory and practice; and
it is well to begin with the former, because it is the simpler of the two.

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When we have once thoroughly mastered the theory, it is easy to understand
the deviations that are made to suit peculiar local conditions.
According, then, to theory, all male peasants in every part of the Empire
are inscribed in census-lists, which form the basis of the direct taxation.
These lists are revised at irregular intervals, and all males alive at the time
of the "revision," from the newborn babe to the centenarian, are duly
inscribed. Each Commune has a list of this kind, and pays to the
Government an annual sum proportionate to the number of names which the
list contains, or, in popular language, according to the number of "revision
souls." During the intervals between the revisions the financial authorities
take no notice of the births and deaths. A Commune which has a hundred
male members at the time of the revision may have in a few years
considerably more or considerably less than that number, but it has to pay
taxes for a hundred members all the same until a new revision is made for
the whole Empire.
Now in Russia, so far at least as the rural population is concerned, the
payment of taxes is inseparably connected with the possession of land.
Every peasant who pays taxes is supposed to have a share of the land
belonging to the Commune. If the Communal revision lists contain a
hundred names, the Communal land ought to be divided into a hundred
shares, and each "revision soul" should enjoy his share in return for the
taxes which he pays.
The reader who has followed my explanations up to this point may
naturally conclude that the taxes paid by the peasants are in reality a species
of rent for the land which they enjoy. Such a conclusion would not be
altogether justified. When a man rents a bit of land he acts according to his
own judgment, and makes a voluntary contract with the proprietor; but the
Russian peasant is obliged to pay his taxes whether he desires to enjoy land
or not. The theory, therefore, that the taxes are simply the rent of the land
will not bear even superficial examination. Equally untenable is the theory
that they are a species of land-tax. In any reasonable system of land-dues
the yearly sum imposed bears some kind of proportion to the quantity and
quality of the land enjoyed; but in Russia it may be that the members of one
Commune possess six acres of bad land, and the members of the
neighbouring Commune seven acres of good land, and yet the taxes in both
cases are the same. The truth is that the taxes are personal, and are

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calculated according to the number of male "souls," and the Government
does not take the trouble to inquire how the Communal land is distributed.
The Commune has to pay into the Imperial Treasury a fixed yearly sum,
according to the number of its "revision souls," and distributes the land
among its members as it thinks fit.
How, then, does the Commune distribute the land? To this question it is
impossible to reply in brief, general terms, because each Commune acts as
it pleases!* Some act strictly according to the theory. These divide their
land at the time of the revision into a number of portions or shares
corresponding to the number of revision souls, and give to each family a
number of shares corresponding to the number of revision souls which it
contains. This is from the administrative point of view by far the simplest
system. The census-list determines how much land each family will enjoy,
and the existing tenures are disturbed only by the revisions which take place
at irregular intervals.** But, on the other hand, this system has serious
defects. The revision-list represents merely the numerical strength of the
families, and the numerical strength is often not at all in proportion to the
working power. Let us suppose, for example, two families, each containing
at the time of the revision five male members. According to the census-list
these two families are equal, and ought to receive equal shares of the land;
but in reality it may happen that the one contains a father in the prime of
life and four able-bodies sons, whilst the other contains a widow and five
little boys. The wants and working power of these two families are of
course very different; and if the above system of distribution be applied, the
man with four sons and a goodly supply of grandchildren will probably find
that he has too little land, whilst the widow with her five little boys will find
it difficult to cultivate the five shares alloted to her, and utterly impossible
to pay the corresponding amount of taxation—for in all cases, it must be
remembered, the Communal burdens are distributed in the same proportion
as the land.

* A long list of the various systems of allotment to be
found in individual Communes in different parts of the
country is given in the opening chapter of a valuable work
by Karelin, entitled "Obshtchinnoye Vladyenie v Rossii" (St.
Petersburg, 1893). As my object is to convey to the reader
merely a general idea of the institution, I refrain from
confusing him by an enumeration of the endless divergencies
from the original type.

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** Since 1719 eleven revisions have been made, the last in
1897. The intervals varied from six to forty-one years.

But why, it may be said, should the widow not accept provisionally the
five shares, and let to others the part which she does not require? The
balance of rent after payment of the taxes might help her to bring up her
young family.
So it seems to one acquainted only with the rural economy of England,
where land is scarce, and always gives a revenue more than sufficient to
defray the taxes. But in Russia the possession of a share of Communal land
is often not a privilege, but a burden. In some Communes the land is so
poor and abundant that it cannot be let at any price. In others the soil will
repay cultivation, but a fair rent will not suffice to pay the taxes and dues.
To obviate these inconvenient results of the simpler system, many
Communes have adopted the expedient of allotting the land, not according
to the number of revision souls, but according to the working power of the
families. Thus, in the instance above supposed, the widow would receive
perhaps two shares, and the large household, containing five workers,
would receive perhaps seven or eight. Since the breaking-up of the large
families, such inequality as I have supposed is, of course, rare; but
inequality of a less extreme kind does still occur, and justifies a departure
from the system of allotment according to the revision-lists.
Even if the allotment be fair and equitable at the time of the revision, it
may soon become unfair and burdensome by the natural fluctuations of the
population. Births and deaths may in the course of a very few years entirely
alter the relative working power of the various families. The sons of the
widow may grow up to manhood, whilst two or three able-bodied members
of the other family may be cut off by an epidemic. Thus, long before a new
revision takes place, the distribution of the land may be no longer in
accordance with the wants and capacities of the various families composing
the Commune. To correct this, various expedients are employed. Some
Communes transfer particular lots from one family to another, as
circumstances demand; whilst others make from time to time, during the
intervals between the revisions, a complete redistribution and reallotment of
the land. Of these two systems the former is now more frequently
employed.

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The system of allotment adopted depends entirely on the will of the
particular Commune. In this respect the Communes enjoy the most
complete autonomy, and no peasant ever dreams of appealing against a
Communal decree.* The higher authorities not only abstain from all
interference in the allotment of the Communal lands, but remain in
profound ignorance as to which system the Communes habitually adopt.
Though the Imperial Administration has a most voracious appetite for
symmetrically constructed statistical tables—many of them formed chiefly
out of materials supplied by the mysterious inner consciousness of the
subordinate officials—no attempt has yet been made, so far as I know, to
collect statistical data which might throw light on this important subject. In
spite of the systematic and persistent efforts of the centralised bureaucracy
to regulate minutely all departments of the national life, the rural
Communes, which contain about five-sixths of the population, remain in
many respects entirely beyond its influence, and even beyond its sphere of
vision! But let not the reader be astonished overmuch. He will learn in time
that Russia is the land of paradoxes; and meanwhile he is about to receive a
still more startling bit of information. In "the great stronghold of Caesarian
despotism and centralised bureaucracy," these Village Communes,
containing about five-sixths of the population, are capital specimens of
representative Constitutional government of the extreme democratic type!

* This has been somewhat modified by recent legislation.
According to the Emancipation Law of 1861, redistribution of
the land could take place at any time provided it was voted
by a majority of two-thirds at the Village Assembly. By a
law of 1893 redistribution cannot take place oftener than
once in twelve years, and must receive the sanction of
certain local authorities.

When I say that the rural Commune is a good specimen of Constitutional
government, I use the phrase in the English, and not in the Continental
sense. In the Continental languages a Constitutional regime implies the
existence of a long, formal document, in which the functions of the various
institutions, the powers of the various authorities, and the methods of
procedure are carefully defined. Such a document was never heard of in
Russian Village Communes, except those belonging to the Imperial
Domains, and the special legislation which formerly regulated their affairs
was repealed at the time of the Emancipation. At the present day the
Constitution of all the Village Communes is of the English type—a body of

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unwritten, traditional conceptions, which have grown up and modified
themselves under the influence of ever-changing practical necessity. No
doubt certain definitions of the functions and mutual relations of the
Communal authorities might be extracted from the Emancipation Law and
subsequent official documents, but as a rule neither the Village Elder nor
the members of the Village Assembly ever heard of such definitions; and
yet every peasant knows, as if by instinct, what each of these authorities can
do and cannot do. The Commune is, in fact, a living institution, whose
spontaneous vitality enables it to dispense with the assistance and guidance
of the written law, and its constitution is thoroughly democratic. The Elder
represents merely the executive power. The real authority resides in the
Assembly, of which all Heads of Households are members.*

* An attempt was made by Alexander III. in 1884 to bring the
rural Communes under supervision and control by the
appointment of rural officials called Zemskiye Natchalniki.
Of this so-called reform I shall have occasion to speak
later.

The simple procedure, or rather the absence of all formal procedure, at
the Assemblies, illustrates admirably the essentially practical character of
the institution. The meetings are held in the open air, because in the village
there is no building—except the church, which can be used only for
religious purposes—large enough to contain all the members; and they
almost always take place on Sundays or holidays, when the peasants have
plenty of leisure. Any open space may serve as a Forum. The discussions
are occasionally very animated, but there is rarely any attempt at speech-
making. If any young member should show an inclination to indulge in
oratory, he is sure to be unceremoniously interrupted by some of the older
members, who have never any sympathy with fine talking. The assemblage
has the appearance of a crowd of people who have accidentally come
together and are discussing in little groups subjects of local interest.
Gradually some one group, containing two or three peasants who have more
moral influence than their fellows, attracts the others, and the discussion
becomes general. Two or more peasants may speak at a time, and interrupt
each other freely—using plain, unvarnished language, not at all
parliamentary—and the discussion may become a confused, unintelligible
din; but at the moment when the spectator imagines that the consultation is
about to be transformed into a free fight, the tumult spontaneously subsides,

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or perhaps a general roar of laughter announces that some one has been
successfully hit by a strong argumentum ad hominem, or biting personal
remark. In any case there is no danger of the disputants coming to blows.
No class of men in the world are more good-natured and pacific than the
Russian peasantry. When sober they never fight, and even when under the
influence of alcohol they are more likely to be violently affectionate than
disagreeably quarrelsome. If two of them take to drinking together, the
probability is that in a few minutes, though they may never have seen each
other before, they will be expressing in very strong terms their mutual
regard and affection, confirming their words with an occasional friendly
embrace.
Theoretically speaking, the Village Parliament has a Speaker, in the
person of the Village Elder. The word Speaker is etymologically less
objectionable than the term President, for the personage in question never
sits down, but mingles in the crowd like the ordinary members. Objection
may be taken to the word on the ground that the Elder speaks much less
than many other members, but this may likewise be said of the Speaker of
the House of Commons. Whatever we may call him, the Elder is officially
the principal personage in the crowd, and wears the insignia of office in the
form of a small medal suspended from his neck by a thin brass chain. His
duties, however, are extremely light. To call to order those who interrupt the
discussion is no part of his functions. If he calls an honourable member
"Durak" (blockhead), or interrupts an orator with a laconic "Moltchi!" (hold
your tongue!), he does so in virtue of no special prerogative, but simply in
accordance with a time-honoured privilege, which is equally enjoyed by all
present, and may be employed with impunity against himself. Indeed, it
may be said in general that the phraseology and the procedure are not
subjected to any strict rules. The Elder comes prominently forward only
when it is necessary to take the sense of the meeting. On such occasions he
may stand back a little from the crowd and say, "Well, orthodox, have you
decided so?" and the crowd will probably shout, "Ladno! ladno!" that is to
say, "Agreed! agreed!"
Communal measures are generally carried in this way by acclamation;
but it sometimes happens that there is such a diversity of opinion that it is
difficult to tell which of the two parties has a majority. In this case the Elder
requests the one party to stand to the right and the other to the left. The two

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groups are then counted, and the minority submits, for no one ever dreams
of opposing openly the will of the Mir.
During the reign of Nicholas I. an attempt was made to regulate by the
written law the procedure of Village Assemblies amongst the peasantry of
the State Domains, and among other reforms voting by ballot was
introduced; but the new custom never struck root. The peasants did not
regard with favour the new method, and persisted in calling it,
contemptuously, "playing at marbles." Here, again, we have one of those
wonderful and apparently anomalous facts which frequently meet the
student of Russian affairs: the Emperor Nicholas I., the incarnation of
autocracy and the champion of the Reactionary Party throughout Europe,
forces the ballot-box, the ingenious invention of extreme radicals, on
several millions of his subjects!
In the northern provinces, where a considerable portion of the male
population is always absent, the Village Assembly generally includes a
good many female members. These are women who, on account of the
absence or death of their husbands, happen to be for the moment Heads of
Households. As such they are entitled to be present, and their right to take
part in the deliberations is never called in question. In matters affecting the
general welfare of the Commune they rarely speak, and if they do venture
to enounce an opinion on such occasions they have little chance of
commanding attention, for the Russian peasantry are as yet little imbued
with the modern doctrines of female equality, and express their opinion of
female intelligence by the homely adage: "The hair is long, but the mind is
short." According to one proverb, seven women have collectively but one
soul, and, according to a still more ungallant popular saying, women have
no souls at all, but only a vapour. Woman, therefore, as woman, is not
deserving of much consideration, but a particular woman, as Head of a
Household, is entitled to speak on all questions directly affecting the
household under her care. If, for instance, it be proposed to increase or
diminish her household's share of the land and the burdens, she will be
allowed to speak freely on the subject, and even to indulge in personal
invective against her male opponents. She thereby exposes herself, it is true,
to uncomplimentary remarks; but any which she happens to receive she is
pretty sure to repay with interest—referring, perhaps, with pertinent
virulence to the domestic affairs of those who attack her. And when

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argument and invective fail, she can try the effect of pathetic appeal,
supported by copious tears.
As the Village Assembly is really a representative institution in the full
sense of the term, it reflects faithfully the good and the bad qualities of the
rural population. Its decisions are therefore usually characterised by plain,
practical common sense, but it is subject to occasional unfortunate
aberrations in consequence of pernicious influences, chiefly of an alcoholic
kind. An instance of this fact occurred during my sojourn at Ivanofka. The
question under discussion was whether a kabak, or gin-shop, should be
established in the village. A trader from the district town desired to establish
one, and offered to pay to the Commune a yearly sum for the necessary
permission. The more industrious, respectable members of the Commune,
backed by the whole female population, were strongly opposed to the
project, knowing full well that a kabak would certainly lead to the ruin of
more than one household; but the enterprising trader had strong arguments
wherewith to seduce a large number of the members, and succeeded in
obtaining a decision in his favour.
The Assembly discusses all matters affecting the Communal welfare,
and, as these matters have never been legally defined, its recognised
competence is very wide. It fixes the time for making the hay, and the day
for commencing the ploughing of the fallow field; it decrees what measures
shall be employed against those who do not punctually pay their taxes; it
decides whether a new member shall be admitted into the Commune, and
whether an old member shall be allowed to change his domicile; it gives or
withholds permission to erect new buildings on the Communal land; it
prepares and signs all contracts which the Commune makes with one of its
own members or with a stranger; it interferes whenever it thinks necessary
in the domestic affairs of its members; it elects the Elder—as well as the
Communal tax-collector and watchman, where such offices exist—and the
Communal herd-boy; above all, it divides and allots the Communal land
among the members as it thinks fit.
Of all these various proceedings the English reader may naturally assume
that the elections are the most noisy and exciting. In reality this is a
mistake. The elections produce little excitement, for the simple reason that,
as a rule, no one desires to be elected. Once, it is said, a peasant who had
been guilty of some misdemeanor was informed by an Arbiter of the Peace

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—a species of official of which I shall have occasion to speak in the sequel
—that he would be no longer capable of filling any Communal office; and
instead of regretting this diminution of his civil rights, he bowed very low,
and respectfully expressed his thanks for the new privilege which he had
acquired. This anecdote may not be true, but it illustrates the undoubted fact
that the Russian peasant regards office as a burden rather than as an honour.
There is no civic ambition in those little rural commonwealths, whilst the
privilege of wearing a bronze medal, which commands no respect, and the
reception of a few roubles as salary afford no adequate compensation for
the trouble, annoyance, and responsibility which a Village Elder has to bear.
The elections are therefore generally very tame and uninteresting. The
following description may serve as an illustration:
It is a Sunday afternoon. The peasants, male and female, have turned out
in Sunday attire, and the bright costumes of the women help the sunshine to
put a little rich colour into the scene, which is at ordinary times
monotonously grey. Slowly the crowd collects on the open space at the side
of the church. All classes of the population are represented. On the extreme
outskirts are a band of fair-haired, merry children—some of them standing
or lying on the grass and gazing attentively at the proceedings, and others
running about and amusing themselves. Close to these stand a group of
young girls, convulsed with half-suppressed laughter. The cause of their
merriment is a youth of some seventeen summers, evidently the wag of the
village, who stands beside them with an accordion in his hand, and relates
to them in a half-whisper how he is about to be elected Elder, and what mad
pranks he will play in that capacity. When one of the girls happens to laugh
outright, the matrons who are standing near turn round and scowl; and one
of them, stepping forward, orders the offender, in a tone of authority, to go
home at once if she cannot behave herself. Crestfallen, the culprit retires,
and the youth who is the cause of the merriment makes the incident the
subject of a new joke. Meanwhile the deliberations have begun. The
majority of the members are chatting together, or looking at a little group
composed of three peasants and a woman, who are standing a little apart
from the others. Here alone the matter in hand is being really discussed. The
woman is explaining, with tears in her eyes, and with a vast amount of
useless repetition, that her "old man," who is Elder for the time being, is
very ill, and cannot fulfil his duties.

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"But he has not yet served a year, and he'll get better," remarks one
peasant, evidently the youngest of the little group.
"Who knows?" replies the woman, sobbing. "It is the will of God, but I
don't believe that he'll ever put his foot to the ground again. The Feldsher
has been four times to see him, and the doctor himself came once, and said
that he must be brought to the hospital."
"And why has he not been taken there?"
"How could he be taken? Who is to carry him? Do you think he's a baby?
The hospital is forty versts off. If you put him in a cart he would die before
he had gone a verst. And then, who knows what they do with people in the
hospital?" This last question contained probably the true reason why the
doctor's orders had been disobeyed.
"Very well, that's enough; hold your tongue," says the grey-beard of the
little group to the woman; and then, turning to the other peasants, remarks,
"There is nothing to be done. The Stanovoi [officer of rural police] will be
here one of these days, and will make a row again if we don't elect a new
Elder. Whom shall we choose?"
As soon as this question is asked several peasants look down to the
ground, or try in some other way to avoid attracting attention, lest their
names should be suggested. When the silence has continued a minute or
two, the greybeard says, "There is Alexei Ivanof; he has not served yet!"
"Yes, yes, Alexei Ivanof!" shout half-a-dozen voices, belonging probably
to peasants who fear they may be elected.
Alexei protests in the strongest terms. He cannot say that he is ill,
because his big ruddy face would give him the lie direct, but he finds half-a-
dozen other reasons why he should not be chosen, and accordingly requests
to be excused. But his protestations are not listened to, and the proceedings
terminate. A new Village Elder has been duly elected.
Far more important than the elections is the redistribution of the
Communal land. It can matter but little to the Head of a Household how the
elections go, provided he himself is not chosen. He can accept with perfect
equanimity Alexei, or Ivan, or Nikolai, because the office-bearers have very
little influence in Communal affairs. But he cannot remain a passive,
indifferent spectator when the division and allotment of the land come to be

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discussed, for the material welfare of every household depends to a great
extent on the amount of land and of burdens which it receives.
In the southern provinces, where the soil is fertile, and the taxes do not
exceed the normal rent, the process of division and allotment is
comparatively simple. Here each peasant desires to get as much land as
possible, and consequently each household demands all the land to which it
is entitled—that is to say, a number of shares equal to the number of its
members inscribed in the last revision list. The Assembly has therefore no
difficult questions to decide. The Communal revision list determines the
number of shares into which the land must be divided, and the number of
shares to be allotted to each family. The only difficulty likely to arise is as
to which particular shares a particular family shall receive, and this
difficulty is commonly obviated by the custom of drawing lots. There may
be, it is true, some difference of opinion as to when a redistribution should
be made, but this question is easily decided by a vote of the Assembly.
Very different is the process of division and allotment in many
Communes of the northern provinces. Here the soil is often very unfertile
and the taxes exceed the normal rent, and consequently it may happen that
the peasants strive to have as little land as possible. In these cases such
scenes as the following may occur:
Ivan is being asked how many shares of the Communal land he will take,
and replies in a slow, contemplative way, "I have two sons, and there is
myself, so I'll take three shares, or somewhat less, if it is your pleasure."
"Less!" exclaims a middle-aged peasant, who is not the Village Elder, but
merely an influential member, and takes the leading part in the proceedings.
"You talk nonsense. Your two sons are already old enough to help you, and
soon they may get married, and so bring you two new female labourers."
"My eldest son," explains Ivan, "always works in Moscow, and the other
often leaves me in summer."
"But they both send or bring home money, and when they get married,
the wives will remain with you."
"God knows what will be," replies Ivan, passing over in silence the first
part of his opponent's remark. "Who knows if they will marry?"
"You can easily arrange that!"

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"That I cannot do. The times are changed now. The young people do as
they wish, and when they do get married they all wish to have houses of
their own. Three shares will be heavy enough for me!"
"No, no. If they wish to separate from you, they will take some land from
you. You must take at least four. The old wives there who have little
children cannot take shares according to the number of souls."
"He is a rich muzhik!" says a voice in the crowd. "Lay on him five
souls!" (that is to say, give him five shares of the land and of the burdens).
"Five souls I cannot! By God, I cannot!"
"Very well, you shall have four," says the leading spirit to Ivan; and then,
turning to the crowd, inquires, "Shall it be so?"
"Four! four!" murmurs the crowd; and the question is settled.
Next comes one of the old wives just referred to. Her husband is a
permanent invalid, and she has three little boys, only one of whom is old
enough for field labour. If the number of souls were taken as the basis of
distribution, she would receive four shares; but she would never be able to
pay four shares of the Communal burdens. She must therefore receive less
than that amount. When asked how many she will take, she replies with
downcast eyes, "As the Mir decides, so be it!"
"Then you must take three."
"What do you say, little father?" cries the woman, throwing off suddenly
her air of submissive obedience. "Do you hear that, ye orthodox? They want
to lay upon me three souls! Was such a thing ever heard of? Since St. Peter's
Day my husband has been bedridden—bewitched, it seems, for nothing
does him good. He cannot put a foot to the ground—all the same as if he
were dead; only he eats bread!"
"You talk nonsense," says a neighbour; "he was in the kabak [gin-shop]
last week."
"And you!" retorts the woman, wandering from the subject in hand;
"what did YOU do last parish fete? Was it not you who got drunk and beat
your wife till she roused the whole village with her shrieking? And no
further gone than last Sunday—pfu!"
"Listen!" says the old man, sternly cutting short the torrent of invective.
"You must take at least two shares and a half. If you cannot manage it
yourself, you can get some one to help you."

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"How can that be? Where am I to get the money to pay a labourer?" asks
the woman, with much wailing and a flood of tears. "Have pity, ye
orthodox, on the poor orphans! God will reward you!" and so on, and so on.
I need not worry the reader with a further description of these scenes,
which are always very long and sometimes violent. All present are deeply
interested, for the allotment of the land is by far the most important event in
Russian peasant life, and the arrangement cannot be made without endless
talking and discussion. After the number of shares for each family has been
decided, the distribution of the lots gives rise to new difficulties. The
families who have plentifully manured their land strive to get back their old
lots, and the Commune respects their claims so far as these are consistent
with the new arrangement; but often it happens that it is impossible to
conciliate private rights and Communal interests, and in such cases the
former are sacrificed in a way that would not be tolerated by men of Anglo-
Saxon race. This leads, however, to no serious consequences. The peasants
are accustomed to work together in this way, to make concessions for the
Communal welfare, and to bow unreservedly to the will of the Mir. I know
of many instances where the peasants have set at defiance the authority of
the police, of the provincial governor, and of the central Government itself,
but I have never heard of any instance where the will of the Mir was openly
opposed by one of its members.
In the preceding pages I have repeatedly spoken about "shares of the
Communal land." To prevent misconception I must explain carefully what
this expression means. A share does not mean simply a plot or parcel of
land; on the contrary, it always contains at least four, and may contain a
large number of distinct plots. We have here a new point of difference
between the Russian village and the villages of Western Europe.
Communal land in Russia is of three kinds: the land on which the village
is built, the arable land, and the meadow or hay-field, if the village is
fortunate enough to possess one. On the first of these each family possesses
a house and garden, which are the hereditary property of the family, and are
never affected by the periodical redistributions. The other two kinds are
both subject to redistribution, but on somewhat different principles.
The whole of the Communal arable land is first of all divided into three
fields, to suit the triennial rotation of crops already described, and each field
is divided into a number of long narrow strips—corresponding to the

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number of male members in the Commune—as nearly as possible equal to
each other in area and quality. Sometimes it is necessary to divide the field
into several portions, according to the quality of the soil, and then to
subdivide each of these portions into the requisite number of strips. Thus in
all cases every household possesses at least one strip in each field; and in
those cases where subdivision is necessary, every household possesses a
strip in each of the portions into which the field is subdivided. It often
happens, therefore, that the strips are very narrow, and the portions
belonging to each family very numerous. Strips six feet wide are by no
means rare. In 124 villages of the province of Moscow, regarding which I
have special information, they varied in width from 3 to 45 yards, with an
average of 11 yards. Of these narrow strips a household may possess as
many as thirty in a single field! The complicated process of division and
subdivision is accomplished by the peasants themselves, with the aid of
simple measuring-rods, and the accuracy of the result is truly marvellous.
The meadow, which is reserved for the production of hay, is divided into
the same number of shares as the arable land. There, however, the division
and distribution take place, not at irregular intervals, but annually. Every
year, on a day fixed by the Assembly, the villagers proceed in a body to this
part of their property, and divide it into the requisite number of portions.
Lots are then cast, and each family at once mows the portion allotted to it.
In some Communes the meadow is mown by all the peasants in common,
and the hay afterwards distributed by lot among the families; but this
system is by no means so frequently used.
As the whole of the Communal land thus resembles to some extent a big
farm, it is necessary to make certain rules concerning cultivation. A family
may sow what it likes in the land allotted to it, but all families must at least
conform to the accepted system of rotation. In like manner, a family cannot
begin the autumn ploughing before the appointed time, because it would
thereby interfere with the rights of the other families, who use the fallow
field as pasturage.
It is not a little strange that this primitive system of land tenure should
have succeeded in living into the twentieth century, and still more
remarkable that the institution of which it forms an essential part should be
regarded by many intelligent people as one of the great institutions of the

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future, and almost as a panacea for social and political evils. The
explanation of these facts will form the subject of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER IX
HOW THE COMMUNE HAS BEEN PRESERVED, AND WHAT IT IS
TO EFFECT IN THE FUTURE
Sweeping Reforms after the Crimean War—Protest Against the Laissez
Faire Principle—Fear of the Proletariat—English and Russian Methods of
Legislation Contrasted—Sanguine Expectations—Evil Consequences of the
Communal System—The Commune of the Future—Proletariat of the
Towns—The Present State of Things Merely Temporary.
The reader is probably aware that immediately after the Crimean War
Russia was subjected to a series of sweeping reforms, including the
emancipation of the serfs and the creation of a new system of local self-
government, and he may naturally wonder how it came to pass that a
curious, primitive institution like the rural Commune succeeded in
weathering the bureaucratic hurricane. This strange phenomena I now
proceed to explain, partly because the subject is in itself interesting, and
partly because I hope thereby to throw some light on the peculiar
intellectual condition of the Russian educated classes.
When it became evident, in 1857, that the serfs were about to be
emancipated, it was at first pretty generally supposed that the rural
Commune would be entirely abolished, or at least radically modified. At
that time many Russians were enthusiastic, indiscriminate admirers of
English institutions, and believed, in common with the orthodox school of
political economists, that England had acquired her commercial and
industrial superiority by adopting the principle of individual liberty and
unrestricted competition, or, as French writers term it, the "laissez faire"
principle. This principle is plainly inconsistent with the rural Commune,
which compels the peasantry to possess land, prevents an enterprising
peasant from acquiring the land of his less enterprising neighbours, and
places very considerable restrictions on the freedom of action of the
individual members. Accordingly it was assumed that the rural Commune,
being inconsistent with the modern spirit of progress, would find no place
in the new regime of liberty which was about to be inaugurated.

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No sooner had these ideas been announced in the Press than they called
forth strenuous protests. In the crowd of protesters were two well-defined
groups. On the one hand there were the so-called Slavophils, a small band
of patriotic, highly educated Moscovites, who were strongly disposed to
admire everything specifically Russian, and who habitually refused to bow
the knee to the wisdom of Western Europe. These gentlemen, in a special
organ which they had recently founded, pointed out to their countrymen that
the Commune was a venerable and peculiarly Russian institution, which
had mitigated in the past the baneful influence of serfage, and would
certainly in the future confer inestimable benefits on the emancipated
peasantry. The other group was animated by a very different spirit. They
had no sympathy with national peculiarities, and no reverence for hoary
antiquity. That the Commune was specifically Russian or Slavonic, and a
remnant of primitive times, was in their eyes anything but a
recommendation in its favour. Cosmopolitan in their tendencies, and
absolutely free from all archaeological sentimentality, they regarded the
institution from the purely utilitarian point of view. They agreed, however,
with the Slavophils in thinking that its preservation would have a beneficial
influence on the material and moral welfare of the peasantry.
For the sake of convenience it is necessary to designate this latter group
by some definite name, but I confess I have some difficulty in making a
choice. I do not wish to call these gentlemen Socialists, because many
people habitually and involuntarily attach a stigma to the word, and believe
that all to whom the term is applied must be first-cousins to the petroleuses.
To avoid misconceptions of this kind, it will be well to designate them
simply by the organ which most ably represented their views, and to call
them the adherents of The Contemporary.
The Slavophils and the adherents of The Contemporary, though differing
widely from each other in many respects, had the same immediate object in
view, and accordingly worked together. With great ingenuity they
contended that the Communal system of land tenure had much greater
advantages, and was attended with much fewer inconveniences, than people
generally supposed. But they did not confine themselves to these immediate
practical advantages, which had very little interest for the general reader.
The writers in The Contemporary explained that the importance of the rural
Commune lies, not in its actual condition, but in its capabilities of
development, and they drew, with prophetic eye, most attractive pictures of

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the happy rural Commune of the future. Let me give here, as an illustration,
one of these prophetic descriptions:
"Thanks to the spread of primary and technical education the peasants
have become well acquainted with the science of agriculture, and are
always ready to undertake in common the necessary improvements. They
no longer exhaust the soil by exporting the grain, but sell merely certain
technical products containing no mineral ingredients. For this purpose the
Communes possess distilleries, starch-works, and the like, and the soil
thereby retains its original fertility. The scarcity induced by the natural
increase of the population is counteracted by improved methods of
cultivation. If the Chinese, who know nothing of natural science, have
succeeded by purely empirical methods in perfecting agriculture to such an
extent that a whole family can support itself on a few square yards of land,
what may not the European do with the help of chemistry, botanical
physiology, and the other natural sciences?"
Coming back from the possibilities of the future to the actualities of the
present, these ingenious and eloquent writers pointed out that in the rural
Commune, Russia possessed a sure preventive against the greatest evil of
West-European social organisation, the Proletariat. Here the Slavophils
could strike in with their favourite refrain about the rotten social condition
of Western Europe; and their temporary allies, though they habitually
scoffed at the Slavophil jeremiads, had no reason for the moment to
contradict them. Very soon the Proletariat became, for the educated classes,
a species of bugbear, and the reading public were converted to the doctrine
that the Communal institutions should be preserved as a means of excluding
the monster from Russia.
This fear of what is vaguely termed the Proletariat is still frequently to be
met with in Russia, and I have often taken pains to discover precisely what
is meant by the term. I cannot, however, say that my efforts have been
completely successful. The monster seems to be as vague and shadowy as
the awful forms which Milton placed at the gate of the infernal regions. At
one moment he seems to be simply our old enemy Pauperism, but when we
approach a little nearer we find that he expands to colossal dimensions, so
as to include all who do not possess inalienable landed property. In short, he
turns out to be, on examination, as vague and undefinable as a good

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bugbear ought to be; and this vagueness contributed probably not a little to
his success.
The influence which the idea of the Proletariat exercised on the public
mind and on the legislation at the time of the Emancipation is a very
notable fact, and well worthy of attention, because it helps to illustrate a
point of difference between Russians and Englishmen.
Englishmen are, as a rule, too much occupied with the multifarious
concerns of the present to look much ahead into the distant future. We
profess, indeed, to regard with horror the maxim, Apres nous le deluge! and
we should probably annihilate with our virtuous indignation any one who
should boldly profess the principle. And yet we often act almost as if we
were really partisans of that heartless creed. When called upon to consider
the interests of the future generations, we declared that "sufficient unto the
day is the evil thereof," and stigmatise as visionaries and dreamers all who
seek to withdraw our attention from the present. A modern Cassandra who
confidently predicts the near exhaustion of our coal-fields, or graphically
describes a crushing national disaster that must some day overtake us, may
attract some public attention; but when we learn that the misfortune is not to
take place in our time, we placidly remark that future generations must take
care of themselves, and that we cannot reasonably be expected to bear their
burdens. When we are obliged to legislate, we proceed in a cautious,
tentative way, and are quite satisfied with any homely, simple remedies that
common sense and experience may suggest, without taking the trouble to
inquire whether the remedy adopted is in accordance with scientific
theories. In short, there is a certain truth in those "famous prophetick
pictures" spoken of by Stillingfleet, which "represent the fate of England by
a mole, a creature blind and busy, continually working under ground."
In Russia we find the opposite extreme. There reformers have been
trained, not in the arena of practical politics, but in the school of political
speculation. As soon, therefore, as they begin to examine any simple matter
with a view to legislation, it at once becomes a "question," and flies up into
the region of political and social science. Whilst we have been groping
along an unexplored path, the Russians have—at least in recent times—
been constantly mapping out, with the help of foreign experience, the
country that lay before them, and advancing with gigantic strides according
to the newest political theories. Men trained in this way cannot rest satisfied

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with homely remedies which merely alleviate the evils of the moment. They
wish to "tear up evil by the roots," and to legislate for future generations as
well as for themselves.
This tendency was peculiarly strong at the time of the Emancipation. The
educated classes were profoundly convinced that the system of Nicholas I.
had been a mistake, and that a new and brighter era was about to dawn upon
the country. Everything had to be reformed. The whole social and political
edifice had to be reconstructed on entirely new principles.
Let us imagine the position of a man who, having no practical
acquaintance with building, suddenly finds himself called upon to construct
a large house, containing all the newest appliances for convenience and
comfort. What will his first step be? Probably he will proceed at once to
study the latest authorities on architecture and construction, and when he
has mastered the general principles he will come down gradually to the
details. This is precisely what the Russians did when they found themselves
called upon to reconstruct the political and social edifice. They eagerly
consulted the most recent English, French, and German writers on social
and political science, and here it was that they made the acquaintance of the
Proletariat.
People who read books of travel without ever leaving their own country
are very apt to acquire exaggerated notions regarding the hardships and
dangers of uncivilised life. They read about savage tribes, daring robbers,
ferocious wild beasts, poisonous snakes, deadly fevers, and the like; and
they cannot but wonder how a human being can exist for a week among
such dangers. But if they happen thereafter to visit the countries described,
they discover to their surprise that, though the descriptions may not have
been exaggerated, life under such conditions is much easier than they
supposed. Now the Russians who read about the Proletariat were very much
like the people who remain at home and devour books of travel. They
gained exaggerated notions, and learned to fear the Proletariat much more
than we do, who habitually live in the midst of it. Of course it is quite
possible that their view of the subject is truer than ours, and that we may
some day, like the people who live tranquilly on the slopes of a volcano, be
rudely awakened from our fancied security. But this is an entirely different
question. I am at present not endeavouring to justify our habitual
callousness with regard to social dangers, but simply seeking to explain

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why the Russians, who have little or no practical acquaintance with
pauperism, should have taken such elaborate precautions against it.
But how can the preservation of the Communal institutions lead to this
"consummation devoutly to be wished," and how far are the precautions
likely to be successful?
Those who have studied the mysteries of social science have generally
come to the conclusion that the Proletariat has been formed chiefly by the
expropriation of the peasantry or small land-holders, and that its formation
might be prevented, or at least retarded, by any system of legislation which
would secure the possession of land for the peasants and prevent them from
being uprooted from the soil. Now it must be admitted that the Russian
Communal system is admirably adapted for this purpose. About one-half of
the arable land has been reserved for the peasantry, and cannot be
encroached on by the great landowners or the capitalists, and every adult
peasant, roughly speaking, has a right to a share of this land. When I have
said that the peasantry compose about five-sixths of the population, and that
it is extremely difficult for a peasant to sever his connection with the rural
Commune, it will be at once evident that, if the theories of social
philosophers are correct, and if the sanguine expectations entertained in
many quarters regarding the permanence of the present Communal
institutions are destined to be realised, there is little or no danger of a
numerous Proletariat being formed, and the Russians are justified in
maintaining, as they often do, that they have successfully solved one of the
most important and most difficult of social problems.
But is there any reasonable chance of these sanguine expectations being
realised?
This is, doubtless, a most complicated and difficult question, but it cannot
be shirked. However sceptical we may be with regard to social panaceas of
all sorts, we cannot dismiss with a few hackneyed phrases a gigantic
experiment in social science involving the material and moral welfare of
many millions of human beings. On the other hand, I do not wish to exhaust
the reader's patience by a long series of multifarious details and conflicting
arguments. What I propose to do, therefore, is to state in a few words the
conclusions at which I have arrived, after a careful study of the question in
all its bearings, and to indicate in a general way how I have arrived at these
conclusions.

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If Russia were content to remain a purely agricultural country of the
Sleepy Hollow type, and if her Government were to devote all its energies
to maintaining economic and social stagnation, the rural Commune might
perhaps prevent the formation of a large Proletariat in the future, as it has
tended to prevent it for centuries in the past. The periodical redistributions
of the Communal land would secure to every family a portion of the soil,
and when the population became too dense, the evils arising from
inordinate subdivision of the land might be obviated by a carefully
regulated system of emigration to the outlying, thinly populated provinces.
All this sounds very well in theory, but experience is proving that it cannot
be carried out in practice. In Russia, as in Western Europe, the struggle for
life, even among the conservative agricultural classes, is becoming yearly
more and more intense, and is producing both the desire and the necessity
for greater freedom of individual character and effort, so that each man may
make his way in the world according to the amount of his intelligence,
energy, spirit of enterprise, and tenacity of purpose. Whatever institutions
tend to fetter the individual and maintain a dead level of mediocrity have
little chance of subsisting for any great length of time, and it must be
admitted that among such institutions the rural Commune in its present
form occupies a prominent place. All its members must possess, in principle
if not always in practice, an equal share of the soil and must practice the
same methods of agriculture, and when a certain inequality has been created
by individual effort it is in great measure wiped out by a redistribution of
the Communal land.
Now, I am well aware that in practice the injustice and inconveniences of
the system, being always tempered and corrected by ingenious
compromises suggested by long experience, are not nearly so great as the
mere theorist might naturally suppose; but they are, I believe, quite great
enough to prevent the permanent maintenance of the institution, and already
there are ominous indications of the coming change, as I shall explain more
fully when I come to deal with the consequences of serf-emancipation. On
the other hand there is no danger of a sudden, general abolition of the old
system. Though the law now permits the transition from Communal to
personal hereditary tenure, even the progressive enterprising peasants are
slow to avail themselves of the permission; and the reason I once heard
given for this conservative tendency is worth recording. A well-to-do
peasant who had been in the habit of manuring his land better than his

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neighbours, and who was, consequently, a loser by the existing system, said
to me: "Of course I want to keep the allotment I have got. But if the land is
never again to be divided my grandchildren may be beggars. We must not
sin against those who are to come after us." This unexpected reply gave me
food for reflection. Surely those muzhiks who are so often accused of being
brutally indifferent to moral obligations must have peculiar deep-rooted
moral conceptions of their own which exercise a great influence on their
daily life. A man who hesitates to sin against his grandchildren still unborn,
though his conceptions of the meum and the tuum in the present may be
occasionally a little confused, must possess somewhere deep down in his
nature a secret fund of moral feeling of a very respectable kind. Even
among the educated classes in Russia the way of looking at these matters is
very different from ours. We should naturally feel inclined to applaud,
encourage, and assist the peasants who show energy and initiative, and who
try to rise above their fellows. To the Russian this seems at once
inexpedient and immoral. The success of the few, he explains, is always
obtained at the expense of the many, and generally by means which the
severe moralist cannot approve of. The rich peasants, for example, have
gained their fortune and influence by demoralising and exploiting their
weaker brethren, by committing all manner of illegalities, and by bribing
the local authorities. Hence they are styled Miroyedy (Commune-
devourers) or Kulaki (fists), or something equally uncomplimentary. Once
this view is adopted, it follows logically that the Communal institutions, in
so far as they form a barrier to the activity of such persons, ought to be
carefully preserved. This idea underlies nearly all the arguments in favour
of the Commune, and explains why they are so popular. Russians of all
classes have, in fact, a leaning towards socialistic notions, and very little
sympathy with our belief in individual initiative and unrestricted
competition.
Even if it be admitted that the Commune may effectually prevent the
formation of an agricultural Proletariat, the question is thereby only half
answered. Russia aspires to become a great industrial and commercial
country, and accordingly her town population is rapidly augmenting. We
have still to consider, then, how the Commune affects the Proletariat of the
towns. In Western Europe the great centres of industry have uprooted from
the soil and collected in the towns a great part of the rural population. Those
who yielded to this attractive influence severed all connection with their

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native villages, became unfit for field labour, and were transformed into
artisans or factory-workers. In Russia this transformation could not easily
take place. The peasant might work during the greater part of his life in the
towns, but he did not thereby sever his connection with his native village.
He remained, whether he desired it or not, a member of the Commune,
possessing a share of the Communal land, and liable for a share of the
Communal burdens. During his residence in the town his wife and family
remained at home, and thither he himself sooner or later returned. In this
way a class of hybrids—half-peasants, half-artisans—has been created, and
the formation of a town Proletariat has been greatly retarded.
The existence of this hybrid class is commonly cited as a beneficent
result of the Communal institutions. The artisans and factory labourers, it is
said, have thus always a home to which they can retire when thrown out of
work or overtaken by old age, and their children are brought up in the
country, instead of being reared among the debilitating influences of
overcrowded cities. Every common labourer has, in short, by this ingenious
contrivance, some small capital and a country residence.
In the present transitional state of Russian society this peculiar
arrangement is at once natural and convenient, but amidst its advantages it
has many serious defects. The unnatural separation of the artisan from his
wife and family leads to very undesirable results, well known to all who are
familiar with the details of peasant life in the northern provinces. And
whatever its advantages and defects may be, it cannot be permanently
retained. At the present time native industry is still in its infancy. Protected
by the tariff from foreign competition, and too few in number to produce a
strong competition among themselves, the existing factories can give to
their owners a large revenue without any strenuous exertion. Manufacturers
can therefore allow themselves many little liberties, which would be quite
inadmissible if the price of manufactured goods were lowered by brisk
competition. Ask a Lancashire manufacturer if he could allow a large
portion of his workers to go yearly to Cornwall or Caithness to mow a field
of hay or reap a few acres of wheat or oats! And if Russia is to make great
industrial progress, the manufacturers of Moscow, Lodz, Ivanovo, and Shui
will some day be as hard pressed as are those of Bradford and Manchester.
The invariable tendency of modern industry, and the secret of its progress,
is the ever-increasing division of labour; and how can this principle be
applied if the artisans insist on remaining agriculturists?

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The interests of agriculture, too, are opposed to the old system.
Agriculture cannot be expected to make progress, or even to be tolerably
productive, if it is left in great measure to women and children. At present it
is not desirable that the link which binds the factory-worker or artisan with
the village should be at once severed, for in the neighbourhood of the large
factories there is often no proper accommodation for the families of the
workers, and agriculture, as at present practised, can be carried on
successfully though the Head of the Household happens to be absent. But
the system must be regarded as simply temporary, and the disruption of
large families—a phenomenon of which I have already spoken—renders its
application more and more difficult.

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CHAPTER X
FINNISH AND TARTAR VILLAGES

A Finnish Tribe—Finnish Villages—Various Stages of Russification—
Finnish Women—Finnish Religions—Method of "Laying" Ghosts—
Curious Mixture of Christianity and Paganism—Conversion of the Finns—
A Tartar Village—A Russian Peasant's Conception of Mahometanism—A
Mahometan's View of Christianity—Propaganda—The Russian Colonist—
Migrations of Peoples During the Dark Ages.
When talking one day with a landed proprietor who lived near Ivanofka, I
accidentally discovered that in a district at some distance to the northeast
there were certain villages the inhabitants of which did not understand
Russian, and habitually used a peculiar language of their own. With an
illogical hastiness worthy of a genuine ethnologist, I at once assumed that
these must be the remnants of some aboriginal race.
"Des aborigenes!" I exclaimed, unable to recall the Russian equivalent
for the term, and knowing that my friend understood French. "Doubtless the
remains of some ancient race who formerly held the country, and are now
rapidly disappearing. Have you any Aborigines Protection Society in this
part of the world?"
My friend had evidently great difficulty in imagining what an Aborigines
Protection Society could be, and promptly assured me that there was
nothing of the kind in Russia. On being told that such a society might
render valuable services by protecting the weaker against the stronger race,
and collecting important materials for the new science of Social
Embryology, he looked thoroughly mystified. As to the new science, he had
never heard of it, and as to protection, he thought that the inhabitants of the
villages in question were quite capable of protecting themselves. "I could
invent," he added, with a malicious smile, "a society for the protection of
ALL peasants, but I am quite sure that the authorities would not allow me to
carry out my idea."

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My ethnological curiosity was thoroughly aroused, and I endeavoured to
awaken a similar feeling in my friend by hinting that we had at hand a
promising field for discoveries which might immortalise the fortunate
explorers; but my efforts were in vain. The old gentleman was a portly,
indolent man, of phlegmatic temperament, who thought more of comfort
than of immortality in the terrestrial sense of the term. To my proposal that
we should start at once on an exploring expedition, he replied calmly that
the distance was considerable, that the roads were muddy, and that there
was nothing to be learned. The villages in question were very like other
villages, and their inhabitants lived, to all intents and purposes, in the same
way as their Russian neighbours. If they had any secret peculiarities they
would certainly not divulge them to a stranger, for they were notoriously
silent, gloomy, morose, and uncommunicative. Everything that was known
about them, my friend assured me, might be communicated in a few words.
They belonged to a Finnish tribe called Korelli, and had been transported to
their present settlements in comparatively recent times. In answer to my
questions as to how, when, and by whom they had been transported thither
my informant replied that it had been the work of Ivan the Terrible.
Though I knew at that time little of Russian history, I suspected that the
last assertion was invented on the spur of the moment, in order to satisfy my
troublesome curiosity, and accordingly I determined not to accept it without
verification. The result showed how careful the traveller should be in
accepting the testimony of "intelligent, well-informed natives." On further
investigation I discovered, not only that the story about Ivan the Terrible
was a pure invention—whether of my friend or of the popular imagination,
which always uses heroic names as pegs on which to hang traditions, I
know not—but also that my first theory was correct. These Finnish peasants
turned out to be a remnant of the aborigines, or at least of the oldest known
inhabitants of the district. Men of the same race, but bearing different tribal
names, such as Finns, Korelli, Tcheremiss, Tchuvash, Mordva, Votyaks,
Permyaks, Zyryanye, Voguls, are to be found in considerable numbers all
over the northern provinces, from the Gulf of Bothnia to Western Siberia, as
well as in the provinces bordering the Middle Volga as far south as Penza,
Simbirsk, and Tamboff.* The Russian peasants, who now compose the great
mass of the population, are the intruders.

* The semi-official "Statesman's Handbook for Russia,"
published in 1896, enumerates fourteen different tribes,

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with an aggregate of about 4,650,000 souls, but these
numbers must not be regarded as having any pretensions to
accuracy. The best authorities differ widely in their
estimates.

I had long taken a deep interest in what learned Germans call the
Volkerwanderung—that is to say, the migrations of peoples during the
gradual dissolution of the Roman Empire, and it had often occurred to me
that the most approved authorities, who had expended an infinite amount of
learning on the subject, had not always taken the trouble to investigate the
nature of the process. It is not enough to know that a race or tribe extended
its dominions or changed its geographical position. We ought at the same
time to inquire whether it expelled, exterminated, or absorbed the former
inhabitants, and how the expulsion, extermination, or absorption was
effected. Now of these three processes, absorption may have been more
frequent than is commonly supposed, and it seemed to me that in Northern
Russia this process might be conveniently studied. A thousand years ago the
whole of Northern Russia was peopled by Finnish pagan tribes, and at the
present day the greater part of it is occupied by peasants who speak the
language of Moscow, profess the Orthodox faith, present in their
physiognomy no striking peculiarities, and appear to the superficial
observer pure Russians. And we have no reason to suppose that the former
inhabitants were expelled or exterminated, or that they gradually died out
from contact with the civilisation and vices of a higher race. History records
no wholesale Finnish migrations like that of the Kalmyks, and no war of
extermination; and statistics prove that among the remnants of those
primitive races the population increases as rapidly as among the Russian
peasantry.* From these facts I concluded that the Finnish aborigines had
been simply absorbed, or rather, were being absorbed, by the Slavonic
intruders.

* This latter statement is made on the authority of Popoff
("Zyryanye i zyryanski krai," Moscow, 1874) and
Tcheremshanski ("Opisanie Orenburgskoi Gubernii," Ufa,
1859).

This conclusion has since been confirmed by observation. During my
wanderings in these northern provinces I have found villages in every stage
of Russification. In one, everything seemed thoroughly Finnish: the
inhabitants had a reddish-olive skin, very high cheek-bones, obliquely set
eyes, and a peculiar costume; none of the women, and very few of the men,

Page 170

could understand Russian, and any Russian who visited the place was
regarded as a foreigner. In a second, there were already some Russian
inhabitants; the others had lost something of their pure Finnish type, many
of the men had discarded the old costume and spoke Russian fluently, and a
Russian visitor was no longer shunned. In a third, the Finnish type was still
further weakened: all the men spoke Russian, and nearly all the women
understood it; the old male costume had entirely disappeared, and the old
female costume was rapidly following it; while intermarriage with the
Russian population was no longer rare. In a fourth, intermarriage had
almost completely done its work, and the old Finnish element could be
detected merely in certain peculiarities of physiognomy and pronunciation.*

* One of the most common peculiarities of pronunciation is
the substitution of the sound of ts for that of tch, which I
found almost universal over a large area.

The process of Russification may be likewise observed in the manner of
building the houses and in the methods of farming, which show plainly that
the Finnish races did not obtain rudimentary civilisation from the Slavs.
Whence, then, was it derived? Was it obtained from some other race, or is it
indigenous? These are questions which I have no means of answering.
A Positivist poet—or if that be a contradiction in terms, let us say a
Positivist who wrote verses—once composed an appeal to the fair sex,
beginning with the words:
"Pourquoi, O femmes, restez-vous en arriere?"
The question might have been addressed to the women in these Finnish
villages. Like their sisters in France, they are much more conservative than
the men, and oppose much more stubbornly the Russian influence. On the
other hand, like women in general, when they do begin to change, they
change more rapidly. This is seen especially in the matter of costume. The
men adopt the Russian costume very gradually; the women adopt it at once.
As soon as a single woman gets a gaudy Russian dress, every other woman
in the village feels envious and impatient till she has done likewise. I
remember once visiting a Mordva village when this critical point had been
reached, and a very characteristic incident occurred. In the preceding
villages through which I had passed I had tried in vain to buy a female
costume, and I again made the attempt. This time the result was very
different. A few minutes after I had expressed my wish to purchase a

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costume, the house in which I was sitting was besieged by a great crowd of
women, holding in their hands articles of wearing apparel. In order to make
a selection I went out into the crowd, but the desire to find a purchaser was
so general and so ardent that I was regularly mobbed. The women, shouting
"Kupi! kupi!" ("Buy! buy!"), and struggling with each other to get near me,
were so importunate that I had at last to take refuge in the house, to prevent
my own costume from being torn to shreds. But even there I was not safe,
for the women followed at my heels, and a considerable amount of good-
natured violence had to be employed to expel the intruders.
It is especially interesting to observe the transformation of nationality in
the sphere of religious conceptions. The Finns remained pagans long after
the Russians had become Christians, but at the present time the whole
population, from the eastern boundary of Finland proper to the Ural
Mountains, are officially described as members of the Greek Orthodox
Church. The manner in which this change of religion was effected is well
worthy of attention.
The old religion of the Finnish tribes, if we may judge from the
fragments which still remain, had, like the people themselves, a thoroughly
practical, prosaic character. Their theology consisted not of abstract
dogmas, but merely of simple prescriptions for the ensuring of material
welfare. Even at the present day, in the districts not completely Russified,
their prayers are plain, unadorned requests for a good harvest, plenty of
cattle, and the like, and are expressed in a tone of childlike familiarity that
sounds strange in our ears. They make no attempt to veil their desires with
mystic solemnity, but ask, in simple, straightforward fashion, that God
should make the barley ripen and the cow calve successfully, that He should
prevent their horses from being stolen, and that he should help them to gain
money to pay their taxes.
Their religious ceremonies have, so far as I have been able to discover,
no hidden mystical signification, and are for the most part rather magical
rites for averting the influence of malicious spirits, or freeing themselves
from the unwelcome visits of their departed relatives. For this latter purpose
many even of those who are officially Christians proceed at stated seasons
to the graveyards and place an abundant supply of cooked food on the
graves of their relations who have recently died, requesting the departed to
accept this meal, and not to return to their old homes, where their presence

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is no longer desired. Though more of the food is eaten at night by the
village dogs than by the famished spirits, the custom is believed to have a
powerful influence in preventing the dead from wandering about at night
and frightening the living. If it be true, as I am inclined to believe, that
tombstones were originally used for keeping the dead in their graves, then it
must be admitted that in the matter of "laying" ghosts the Finns have shown
themselves much more humane than other races. It may, however, be
suggested that in the original home of the Finns—"le berceau de la race," as
French ethnologists say—stones could not easily be procured, and that the
custom of feeding the dead was adopted as a pis aller. The decision of the
question must be left to those who know where the original home of the
Finns was.
As the Russian peasantry, knowing little or nothing of theology, and
placing implicit confidence in rites and ceremonies, did not differ very
widely from the pagan Finns in the matter of religious conceptions, the
friendly contact of the two races naturally led to a curious blending of the
two religions. The Russians adopted many customs from the Finns, and the
Finns adopted still more from the Russians. When Yumala and the other
Finnish deities did not do as they were desired, their worshippers naturally
applied for protection or assistance to the Madonna and the "Russian God."
If their own traditional magic rites did not suffice to ward off evil
influences, they naturally tried the effect of crossing themselves, as the
Russians do in moments of danger. All this may seem strange to us who
have been taught from our earliest years that religion is something quite
different from spells, charms, and incantations, and that of all the various
religions in the world one alone is true, all the others being false. But we
must remember that the Finns have had a very different education. They do
not distinguish religion from magic rites, and they have never been taught
that other religions are less true than their own. For them the best religion is
the one which contains the most potent spells, and they see no reason why
less powerful religions should not be blended therewith. Their deities are
not jealous gods, and do not insist on having a monopoly of devotion; and
in any case they cannot do much injury to those who have placed
themselves under the protection of a more powerful divinity.
This simple-minded eclecticism often produces a singular mixture of
Christianity and paganism. Thus, for instance, at the harvest festivals,
Tchuvash peasants have been known to pray first to their own deities, and

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then to St. Nicholas, the miracle-worker, who is the favourite saint of the
Russian peasantry. Such dual worship is sometimes even recommended by
the Yomzi—a class of men who correspond to the medicine-men among the
Red Indians—and the prayers are on these occasions couched in the most
familiar terms. Here is a specimen given by a Russian who has specially
studied the language and customs of this interesting people:* "Look here, O
Nicholas-god! Perhaps my neighbour, little Michael, has been slandering
me to you, or perhaps he will do so. If he does, don't believe him. I have
done him no ill, and wish him none. He is a worthless boaster and a babbler.
He does not really honour you, and merely plays the hypocrite. But I
honour you from my heart; and, behold, I place a taper before you!"
Sometimes incidents occur which display a still more curious blending of
the two religions. Thus a Tcheremiss, on one occasion, in consequence of a
serious illness, sacrificed a young foal to our Lady of Kazan!

* Mr. Zolotnitski, "Tchuvasko-russki slovar," p. 167.

Though the Finnish beliefs affected to some extent the Russian peasantry,
the Russian faith ultimately prevailed. This can be explained without taking
into consideration the inherent superiority of Christianity over all forms of
paganism. The Finns had no organised priesthood, and consequently never
offered a systematic opposition to the new faith; the Russians, on the
contrary, had a regular hierarchy in close alliance with the civil
administration. In the principal villages Christian churches were built, and
some of the police-officers vied with the ecclesiastical officials in the work
of making converts. At the same time there were other influences tending in
the same direction. If a Russian practised Finnish superstitions he exposed
himself to disagreeable consequences of a temporal kind; if, on the contrary,
a Finn adopted the Christian religion, the temporal consequences that could
result were all advantageous to him.
Many of the Finns gradually became Christians almost unconsciously.
The ecclesiastical authorities were extremely moderate in their demands.
They insisted on no religious knowledge, and merely demanded that the
converts should be baptised. The converts, failing to understand the spiritual
significance of the ceremony, commonly offered no resistance, so long as
the immersion was performed in summer. So little repugnance, indeed, did
they feel, that on some occasions, when a small reward was given to those
who consented, some of the new converts wished the ceremony to be

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repeated several times. The chief objection to receiving the Christian faith
lay in the long and severe fasts imposed by the Greek Orthodox Church; but
this difficulty was overcome by assuming that they need not be strictly
observed. At first, in some districts, it was popularly believed that the Icons
informed the Russian priests against those who did not fast as the Church
prescribed; but experience gradually exploded this theory. Some of the
more prudent converts, however, to prevent all possible tale-telling, took the
precaution of turning the face of the Icon to the wall when prohibited meats
were about to be eaten!
This gradual conversion of the Finnish tribes, effected without any
intellectual revolution in the minds of the converts, had very important
temporal consequences. Community of faith led to intermarriage, and
intermarriage led rapidly to the blending of the two races.
If we compare a Finnish village in any stage of Russification with a
Tartar village, of which the inhabitants are Mahometans, we cannot fail to
be struck by the contrast. In the latter, though there may be many Russians,
there is no blending of the two races. Between them religion has raised an
impassable barrier. There are many villages in the eastern and north-eastern
provinces of European Russia which have been for generations half Tartar
and half Russian, and the amalgamation of the two nationalities has not yet
begun. Near the one end stands the Christian church, and near the other
stands the little metchet, or Mahometan house of prayer. The whole village
forms one Commune, with one Village Assembly and one Village Elder;
but, socially, it is composed of two distinct communities, each possessing
its peculiar customs and peculiar mode of life. The Tartar may learn
Russian, but he does not on that account become Russianised.
It must not, however, be supposed that the two races are imbued with
fanatical hatred towards each other. On the contrary, they live in perfect
good-fellowship, elect as Village Elder sometimes a Russian and sometimes
a Tartar, and discuss the Communal affairs in the Village Assembly without
reference to religious matters. I know one village where the good-
fellowship went even a step farther: the Christians determined to repair their
church, and the Mahometans helped them to transport wood for the
purpose! All this tends to show that under a tolerably good Government,
which does not favour one race at the expense of the other, Mahometan
Tartars and Christian Slavs can live peaceably together.

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The absence of fanaticism and of that proselytising zeal which is one of
the most prolific sources of religious hatred, is to be explained by the
peculiar religious conceptions of these peasants. In their minds religion and
nationality are so closely allied as to be almost identical. The Russian is, as
it were, by nature a Christian, and the Tartar a Mahometan; and it never
occurs to any one in these villages to disturb the appointed order of nature.
On this subject I had once an interesting conversation with a Russian
peasant who had been for some time living among Tartars. In reply to my
question as to what kind of people the Tartars were, he replied laconically,
"Nitchevo"—that is to say, "nothing in particular"; and on being pressed for
a more definite expression of opinion, he admitted that they were very good
people indeed.
"And what kind of faith have they?" I continued.
"A good enough faith," was the prompt reply.
"Is it better than the faith of the Molokanye?" The Molokanye are
Russian sectarians—closely resembling Scotch Presbyterians—of whom I
shall have more to say in the sequel.
"Of course it is better than the Molokan faith."
"Indeed!" I exclaimed, endeavouring to conceal my astonishment at this
strange judgment. "Are the Molokanye, then, very bad people?"
"Not at all. The Molokanye are good and honest."
"Why, then, do you think their faith is so much worse than that of the
Mahometans?"
"How shall I tell you?" The peasant here paused as if to collect his
thoughts, and then proceeded slowly, "The Tartars, you see, received their
faith from God as they received the colour of their skins, but the Molokanye
are Russians who have invented a faith out of their own heads!"
This singular answer scarcely requires a commentary. As it would be
absurd to try to make Tartars change the colour of their skins, so it would be
absurd to try to make them change their religion. Besides this, such an
attempt would be an unjustifiable interference with the designs of
Providence, for, in the peasant's opinion, God gave Mahometanism to the
Tartars just as he gave the Orthodox faith to the Russians.
The ecclesiastical authorities do not formally adopt this strange theory,
but they generally act in accordance with it. There is little official

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propaganda among the Mahometan subjects of the Tsar, and it is well that it
is so, for an energetic propaganda would lead merely to the stirring up of
any latent hostility which may exist deep down in the nature of the two
races, and it would not make any real converts. The Tartars cannot
unconsciously imbibe Christianity as the Finns have done. Their religion is
not a rude, simple paganism without theology in the scholastic sense of the
term, but a monotheism as exclusive as Christianity itself. Enter into
conversation with an intelligent man who has no higher religious belief than
a rude sort of paganism, and you may, if you know him well and make a
judicious use of your knowledge, easily interest him in the touching story of
Christ's life and teaching. And in these unsophisticated natures there is but
one step from interest and sympathy to conversion.
Try the same method with a Mussulman, and you will soon find that all
your efforts are fruitless. He has already a theology and a prophet of his
own, and sees no reason why he should exchange them for those which you
have to offer. Perhaps he will show you more or less openly that he pities
your ignorance and wonders that you have not been able to ADVANCE
from Christianity to Mahometanism. In his opinion—I am supposing that he
is a man of education—Moses and Christ were great prophets in their day,
and consequently he is accustomed to respect their memory; but he is
profoundly convinced that however appropriate they were for their own
times, they have been entirely superseded by Mahomet, precisely as we
believe that Judaism was superseded by Christianity. Proud of his superior
knowledge, he regards you as a benighted polytheist, and may perhaps tell
you that the Orthodox Christians with whom he comes in contact have three
Gods and a host of lesser deities called saints, that they pray to idols called
Icons, and that they keep their holy days by getting drunk. In vain you
endeavour to explain to him that saints and Icons are not essential parts of
Christianity, and that habits of intoxication have no religious significance.
On these points he may make concessions to you, but the doctrine of the
Trinity remains for him a fatal stumbling-block. "You Christians," he will
say, "once had a great prophet called Jisous, who is mentioned with respect
in the Koran, but you falsified your sacred writings and took to worshipping
him, and now you declare that he is the equal of Allah. Far from us be such
blasphemy! There is but one God, and Mahomet is His prophet."
A worthy Christian missionary, who had laboured long and zealously
among a Mussulman population, once called me sharply to account for

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having expressed the opinion that Mahometans are very rarely converted to
Christianity. When I brought him down from the region of vague general
statements and insisted on knowing how many cases he had met with in his
own personal experience during sixteen years of missionary work, he was
constrained to admit that he had know only one: and when I pressed him
farther as to the disinterested sincerity of the convert in question his reply
was not altogether satisfactory.
The policy of religious non-intervention has not always been practised by
the Government. Soon after the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan in the
sixteenth century, the Tsars of Muscovy attempted to convert their new
subjects from Mahometanism to Christianity. The means employed were
partly spiritual and partly administrative, but the police-officers seem to
have played a more important part than the clergy. In this way a certain
number of Tartars were baptised; but the authorities were obliged to admit
that the new converts "shamelessly retain many horrid Tartar customs, and
neither hold nor know the Christian faith." When spiritual exhortations
failed, the Government ordered its officials to "pacify, imprison, put in
irons, and thereby UNTEACH and frighten from the Tartar faith those who,
though baptised, do not obey the admonitions of the Metropolitan." These
energetic measures proved as ineffectual as the spiritual exhortations; and
Catherine II. adopted a new method, highly characteristic of her system of
administration. The new converts—who, be it remembered, were unable to
read and write—were ordered by Imperial ukaz to sign a written promise to
the effect that "they would completely forsake their infidel errors, and,
avoiding all intercourse with unbelievers, would hold firmly and
unwaveringly the Christian faith and its dogmas"*—of which latter, we
may add, they had not the slightest knowledge. The childlike faith in the
magical efficacy of stamped paper here displayed was not justified. The so-
called "baptised Tartars" are at the present time as far from being Christians
as they were in the sixteenth century. They cannot openly profess
Mahometanism, because men who have been once formally admitted into
the National Church cannot leave it without exposing themselves to the
severe pains and penalties of the criminal code, but they strongly object to
be Christianised.

* "Ukaz Kazanskoi dukhovnoi Konsistorii." Anno 1778.

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On this subject I have found a remarkable admission in a semiofficial
article, published as recently as 1872.* "It is a fact worthy of attention,"
says the writer, "that a long series of evident apostasies coincides with the
beginning of measures to confirm the converts in the Christian faith. There
must be, therefore, some collateral cause producing those cases of apostasy
precisely at the moment when the contrary might be expected." There is a
delightful naivete in this way of stating the fact. The mysterious cause
vaguely indicated is not difficult to find. So long as the Government
demanded merely that the supposed converts should be inscribed as
Christians in the official registers, there was no official apostasy; but as
soon as active measures began to be taken "to confirm the converts," a spirit
of hostility and fanaticism appeared among the Mussulman population, and
made those who were inscribed as Christians resist the propaganda.

* "Zhurnal Ministerstva Narodnago Prosveshtcheniya." June,
1872.

It may safely be said that Christians are impervious to Islam, and genuine
Mussulmans impervious to Christianity; but between the two there are
certain tribes, or fractions of tribes, which present a promising field for
missionary enterprise. In this field the Tartars show much more zeal than
the Russians, and possess certain advantages over their rivals. The tribes of
Northeastern Russia learn Tartar much more easily than Russian, and their
geographical position and modes of life bring them in contact with Russians
much less than with Tartars. The consequence is that whole villages of
Tcheremiss and Votiaks, officially inscribed as belonging to the Greek
Orthodox Church, have openly declared themselves Mahometans; and some
of the more remarkable conversions have been commemorated by popular
songs, which are sung by young and old. Against this propaganda the
Orthodox ecclesiastical authorities do little or nothing. Though the criminal
code contains severe enactments against those who fall away from the
Orthodox Church, and still more against those who produce apostasy,* the
enactments are rarely put in force. Both clergy and laity in the Russian
Church are, as a rule, very tolerant where no political questions are
involved. The parish priest pays attention to apostasy only when it
diminishes his annual revenues, and this can be easily avoided by the
apostate's paying a small yearly sum. If this precaution be taken, whole

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villages may be converted to Islam without the higher ecclesiastical
authorities knowing anything of the matter.

* A person convicted of converting a Christian to Islamism
is sentenced, according to the criminal code (§184), to the
loss of all civil rights, and to imprisonment with hard
labour for a term varying from eight to ten years.

Whether the barrier that separates Christians and Mussulmans in Russia,
as elsewhere, will ever be broken down by education, I do not know; but I
may remark that hitherto the spread of education among the Tartars has
tended rather to imbue them with fanaticism. If we remember that
theological education always produces intolerance, and that Tartar
education is almost exclusively theological, we shall not be surprised to
find that a Tartar's religious fanaticism is generally in direct proportion to
the amount of his intellectual culture. The unlettered Tartar, unspoiled by
learning falsely so called, and knowing merely enough of his religion to
perform the customary ordinances prescribed by the Prophet, is peaceable,
kindly, and hospitable towards all men; but the learned Tartar, who has been
taught that the Christian is a kiafir (infidel) and a mushrik (polytheist),
odious in the sight of Allah, and already condemned to eternal punishment,
is as intolerant and fanatical as the most bigoted Roman Catholic or
Calvinist. Such fanatics are occasionally to be met with in the eastern
provinces, but they are few in number, and have little influence on the
masses. From my own experience I can testify that during the whole course
of my wanderings I have nowhere received more kindness and hospitality
than among the uneducated Mussulman Bashkirs. Even here, however,
Islam opposes a strong barrier to Russification.
Though no such barrier existed among the pagan Finnish tribes, the work
of Russification among them is still, as I have already indicated, far from
complete. Not only whole villages, but even many entire districts, are still
very little affected by Russian influence. This is to be explained partly by
geographical conditions. In regions which have a poor soil, and are
intersected by no navigable river, there are few or no Russian settlers, and
consequently the Finns have there preserved intact their language and
customs; whilst in those districts which present more inducements to
colonisation, the Russian population is more numerous, and the Finns less
conservative. It must, however, be admitted that geographical conditions do
not completely explain the facts. The various tribes, even when placed in

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the same conditions, are not equally susceptible to foreign influence. The
Mordva, for instance, are infinitely less conservative than the Tchuvash.
This I have often noticed, and my impression has been confirmed by men
who have had more opportunities of observation. For the present we must
attribute this to some occult ethnological peculiarity, but future
investigations may some day supply a more satisfactory explanation.
Already I have obtained some facts which appear to throw light on the
subject. The Tchuvash have certain customs which seem to indicate that
they were formerly, if not avowed Mahometans, at least under the influence
of Islam, whilst we have no reason to suppose that the Mordva ever passed
through that school.
The absence of religious fanaticism greatly facilitated Russian
colonisation in these northern regions, and the essentially peaceful
disposition of the Russian peasantry tended in the same direction. The
Russian peasant is admirably fitted for the work of peaceful agricultural
colonisation. Among uncivilised tribes he is good-natured, long-suffering,
conciliatory, capable of bearing extreme hardships, and endowed with a
marvellous power of adapting himself to circumstances. The haughty
consciousness of personal and national superiority habitually displayed by
Englishmen of all ranks when they are brought in contact with races which
they look upon as lower in the scale of humanity than themselves, is
entirely foreign to his character. He has no desire to rule, and no wish to
make the natives hewers of wood and drawers of water. All he desires is a
few acres of land which he and his family can cultivate; and so long as he is
allowed to enjoy these he is not likely to molest his neighbours. Had the
colonists of the Finnish country been men of Anglo-Saxon race, they would
in all probability have taken possession of the land and reduced the natives
to the condition of agricultural labourers. The Russian colonists have
contented themselves with a humbler and less aggressive mode of action;
they have settled peaceably among the native population, and are rapidly
becoming blended with it. In many districts the so-called Russians have
perhaps more Finnish than Slavonic blood in their veins.
But what has all this to do, it may be asked, with the aforementioned
Volkerwanderung, or migration of peoples, during the Dark Ages? More
than may at first sight appear. Some of the so-called migrations were, I
suspect, not at all migrations in the ordinary sense of the term, but rather
gradual changes, such as those which have taken place, and are still taking

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place, in Northern Russia. A thousand years ago what is now known as the
province of Yaroslavl was inhabited by Finns, and now it is occupied by
men who are commonly regarded as pure Slavs. But it would be an utter
mistake to suppose that the Finns of this district migrated to those more
distant regions where they are now to be found. In reality they formerly
occupied, as I have said, the whole of Northern Russia, and in the province
of Yaroslavl they have been transformed by Slav infiltration. In Central
Europe the Slavs may be said in a certain sense to have retreated, for in
former times they occupied the whole of Northern Germany as far as the
Elbe. But what does the word "retreat" mean in this case? It means probably
that the Slays were gradually Teutonised, and then absorbed by the Teutonic
race. Some tribes, it is true, swept over a part of Europe in genuine nomadic
fashion, and endeavoured perhaps to expel or exterminate the actual
possessors of the soil. This kind of migration may likewise be studied in
Russia. But I must leave the subject till I come to speak of the southern
provinces.

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CHAPTER XI
LORD NOVGOROD THE GREAT

Departure from Ivanofka and Arrival at Novgorod—The Eastern Half of
the Town—The Kremlin—An Old Legend—The Armed Men of Rus—The
Northmen—Popular Liberty in Novgorod—The Prince and the Popular
Assembly—Civil Dissensions and Faction-fights—The Commercial
Republic Conquered by the Muscovite Tsars—Ivan the Terrible—Present
Condition of the Town—Provincial Society—Card-playing—Periodicals
—"Eternal Stillness."
Country life in Russia is pleasant enough in summer or in winter, but
between summer and winter there is an intermediate period of several
weeks when the rain and mud transform a country-house into something
very like a prison. To escape this durance vile I determined in the month of
October to leave Ivanofka, and chose as my headquarters for the next few
months the town of Novgorod—the old town of that name, not to be
confounded with Nizhni Novgorod—i.e., Lower Novgorod, on the Volga—
where the great annual fair is held.
For this choice there were several reasons. I did not wish to go to St.
Petersburg or Moscow, because I foresaw that in either of those cities my
studies would certainly be interrupted. In a quiet, sleepy provincial town I
should have much more chance of coming in contact with people who could
not speak fluently any West-European languages, and much better
opportunities for studying native life and local administration. Of the
provincial capitals, Novgorod was the nearest, and more interesting than
most of its rivals; for it has had a curious history, much older than that of St.
Petersburg or even of Moscow, and some traces of its former greatness are
still visible. Though now a town of third-rate importance—a mere shadow
of its former self—it still contains about 21,000 inhabitants, and is the
administrative centre of the large province in which it is situated.
About eighty miles before reaching St. Petersburg the Moscow railway
crosses the Volkhof, a rapid, muddy river which connects Lake Ilmen with
Lake Ladoga. At the point of intersection I got on board a small steamer and

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sailed up stream towards Lake Ilmen for about fifty miles.* The journey
was tedious, for the country was flat and monotonous, and the steamer,
though it puffed and snorted inordinately, did not make more than nine
knots. Towards sunset Novgorod appeared on the horizon. Seen thus at a
distance in the soft twilight, it seemed decidedly picturesque. On the east
bank lay the greater part of the town, the sky line of which was agreeably
broken by the green roofs and pear-shaped cupolas of many churches. On
the opposite bank rose the Kremlin. Spanning the river was a long,
venerable stone bridge, half hidden by a temporary wooden one, which was
doing duty for the older structure while the latter was being repaired. A
cynical fellow-passenger assured me that the temporary structure was
destined to become permanent, because it yielded a comfortable revenue to
certain officials, but this sinister prediction has not been verified.

* The journey would now be made by rail, but the branch line
which runs near the bank of the river had not been
constructed at that time.

That part of Novgorod which lies on the eastern bank of the river, and in
which I took up my abode for several months, contains nothing that is
worthy of special mention. As is the case in most Russian towns, the streets
are straight, wide, and ill-paved, and all run parallel or at right angles to
each other. At the end of the bridge is a spacious market-place, flanked on
one side by the Town-house. Near the other side stand the houses of the
Governor and of the chief military authority of the district. The only other
buildings of note are the numerous churches, which are mostly small, and
offer nothing that is likely to interest the student of architecture. Altogether
this part of the town is unquestionably commonplace. The learned
archaeologist may detect in it some traces of the distant past, but the
ordinary traveller will find little to arrest his attention.
If now we cross over to the other side of the river, we are at once
confronted by something which very few Russian towns possess—a
kremlin, or citadel. This is a large and slightly-elevated enclosure,
surrounded by high brick walls, and in part by the remains of a moat.
Before the days of heavy artillery these walls must have presented a
formidable barrier to any besieging force, but they have long ceased to have
any military significance, and are now nothing more than an historical
monument. Passing through the gateway which faces the bridge, we find

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ourselves in a large open space. To the right stands the cathedral—a small,
much-venerated church, which can make no pretensions to architectural
beauty—and an irregular group of buildings containing the consistory and
the residence of the Archbishop. To the left is a long symmetrical range of
buildings containing the Government offices and the law courts. Midway
between this and the cathedral, in the centre of the great open space, stands
a colossal monument, composed of a massive circular stone pedestal and an
enormous globe, on and around which cluster a number of emblematic and
historical figures. This curious monument, which has at least the merit of
being original in design, was erected in 1862, in commemoration of
Russia's thousandth birthday, and is supposed to represent the history of
Russia in general and of Novgorod in particular during the last thousand
years. It was placed here because Novgorod is the oldest of Russian towns,
and because somewhere in the surrounding country occurred the incident
which is commonly recognised as the foundation of the Russian Empire.
The incident in question is thus described in the oldest chronicle:
"At that time, as the southern Slavonians paid tribute to the Kozars, so
the Novgorodian Slavonians suffered from the attacks of the Variags. For
some time the Variags exacted tribute from the Novgorodian Slavonians and
the neighbouring Finns; then the conquered tribes, by uniting their forces,
drove out the foreigners. But among the Slavonians arose strong internal
dissensions; the clans rose against each other. Then, for the creation of order
and safety, they resolved to call in princes from a foreign land. In the year
862 Slavonic legates went away beyond the sea to the Variag tribe called
Rus, and said, 'Our land is great and fruitful, but there is no order in it;
come and reign and rule over us.' Three brothers accepted the invitation,
and appeared with their armed followers. The eldest of these, Rurik, settled
in Novgorod; the second, Sineus, at Byelo-ozero; and the third, Truvor, in
Isborsk. From them our land is called Rus. After two years the brothers of
Rurik died. He alone began to rule over the Novgorod district, and confided
to his men the administration of the principal towns."
This simple legend has given rise to a vast amount of learned
controversy, and historical investigators have fought valiantly with each
other over the important question, Who were those armed men of Rus? For
a long time the commonly received opinion was that they were Normans
from Scandinavia. The Slavophils accepted the legend literally in this sense,
and constructed upon it an ingenious theory of Russian history. The nations

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of the West, they said, were conquered by invaders, who seized the country
and created the feudal system for their own benefit; hence the history of
Western Europe is a long tale of bloody struggles between conquerors and
conquered, and at the present day the old enmity still lives in the political
rivalry of the different social classes. The Russo-Slavonians, on the
contrary, were not conquered, but voluntarily invited a foreign prince to
come and rule over them! Hence the whole social and political development
of Russia has been essentially peaceful, and the Russian people know
nothing of social castes or feudalism. Though this theory afforded some
nourishment for patriotic self-satisfaction, it displeased extreme patriots,
who did not like the idea that order was first established in their country by
men of Teutonic race. These preferred to adopt the theory that Rurik and his
companions were Slavonians from the shores of the Baltic.
Though I devoted to the study of this question more time and labour than
perhaps the subject deserved, I have no intention of inviting the reader to
follow me through the tedious controversy. Suffice it to say that, after
careful consideration, and with all due deference to recent historians, I am
inclined to adopt the old theory, and to regard the Normans of Scandinavia
as in a certain sense the founders of the Russian Empire. We know from
other sources that during the ninth century there was a great exodus from
Scandinavia. Greedy of booty, and fired with the spirit of adventure, the
Northmen, in their light, open boats, swept along the coasts of Germany,
France, Spain, Greece, and Asia Minor, pillaging the towns and villages
near the sea, and entering into the heart of the country by means of the
rivers. At first they were mere marauders, and showed everywhere such
ferocity and cruelty that they came to be regarded as something akin to
plagues and famines, and the faithful added a new petition to the Litany,
"From the wrath and malice of the Normans, O Lord, deliver us!" But
towards the middle of the century the movement changed its character. The
raids became military invasions, and the invaders sought to conquer the
lands which they had formerly plundered, "ut acquirant sibi spoliando regna
quibus possent vivere pace perpetua." The chiefs embraced Christianity,
married the daughters or sisters of the reigning princes, and obtained the
conquered territories as feudal grants. Thus arose Norman principalities in
the Low Countries, in France, in Italy, and in Sicily; and the Northmen,
rapidly blending with the native population, soon showed as much political
talent as they had formerly shown reckless and destructive valour.

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It would have been strange indeed if these adventurers, who succeeded in
reaching Asia Minor and the coasts of North America, should have
overlooked Russia, which lay, as it were, at their very doors. The Volkhof,
flowing through Novgorod, formed part of a great waterway which afforded
almost uninterrupted water-communication between the Baltic and the
Black Sea; and we know that some time afterwards the Scandinavians used
this route in their journeys to Constantinople. The change which the
Scandinavian movement underwent elsewhere is clearly indicated by the
Russian chronicles: first, the Variags came as collectors of tribute, and
raised so much popular opposition that they were expelled, and then they
came as rulers, and settled in the country. Whether they really came on
invitation may be doubted, but that they adopted the language, religion, and
customs of the native population does not militate against the assertion that
they were Normans. On the contrary, we have here rather an additional
confirmation, for elsewhere the Normans did likewise. In the North of
France they adopted almost at once the French language and religion, and
the son and successor of the famous Rollo was sometimes reproached with
being more French than Norman.*

*Strinnholm, "Die Vikingerzuge" (Hamburg, 1839), I., p. 135.

Though it is difficult to decide how far the legend is literally true, there
can be no possible doubt that the event which it more or less accurately
describes had an important influence on Russian history. From that time
dates the rapid expansion of the Russo-Slavonians—a movement that is still
going on at the present day. To the north, the east, and the south new
principalities were formed and governed by men who all claimed to be
descendants of Rurik, and down to the end of the sixteenth century no
Russian outside of this great family ever attempted to establish independent
sovereignty.
For six centuries after the so-called invitation of Rurik the city on the
Volkhof had a strange, checkered history. Rapidly it conquered the
neighbouring Finnish tribes, and grew into a powerful independent state,
with a territory extending to the Gulf of Finland, and northwards to the
White Sea. At the same time its commercial importance increased, and it
became an outpost of the Hanseatic League. In this work the descendants of
Rurik played an important part, but they were always kept in strict
subordination to the popular will. Political freedom kept pace with

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commercial prosperity. What means Rurik employed for establishing and
preserving order we know not, but the chronicles show that his successors
in Novgorod possessed merely such authority as was freely granted them by
the people. The supreme power resided, not in the prince, but in the
assembly of the citizens called together in the market-place by the sound of
the great bell. This assembly made laws for the prince as well as for the
people, entered into alliances with foreign powers, declared war, and
concluded peace, imposed taxes, raised troops, and not only elected the
magistrates, but also judged and deposed them when it thought fit. The
prince was little more than the hired commander of the troops and the
president of the judicial administration. When entering on his functions he
had to take a solemn oath that he would faithfully observe the ancient laws
and usages, and if he failed to fulfil his promise he was sure to be
summarily deposed and expelled. The people had an old rhymed proverb,
"Koli khud knyaz, tak v gryaz!" "If the prince is bad, into the mud with
him!", and they habitually acted according to it. So unpleasant, indeed, was
the task of ruling those sturdy, stiff-necked burghers, that some princes
refused to undertake it, and others, having tried it for a time, voluntarily laid
down their authority and departed. But these frequent depositions and
abdications—as many as thirty took place in the course of a single century
—did not permanently disturb the existing order of things. The descendants
of Rurik were numerous, and there were always plenty of candidates for the
vacant post. The municipal republic continued to grow in strength and in
riches, and during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it proudly styled
itself "Lord Novgorod the Great" (Gospodin Velilki Novgorod).
"Then came a change, as all things human change." To the east arose the
principality of Moscow—not an old, rich municipal republic, but a young,
vigorous State, ruled by a line of crafty, energetic, ambitious, and
unscrupulous princes of the Rurik stock, who were freeing the country from
the Tartar yoke and gradually annexing by fair means and foul the
neighbouring principalities to their own dominions. At the same time, and
in a similar manner, the Lithuanian Princes to the westward united various
small principalities and formed a large independent State. Thus Novgorod
found itself in a critical position. Under a strong Government it might have
held its own against these rivals and successfully maintained its
independence, but its strength was already undermined by internal
dissensions. Political liberty had led to anarchy. Again and again on that

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great open space where the national monument now stands, and in the
market-place on the other side of the river, scenes of disorder and bloodshed
took place, and more than once on the bridge battles were fought by
contending factions. Sometimes it was a contest between rival families, and
sometimes a struggle between the municipal aristocracy, who sought to
monopolise the political power, and the common people, who wished to
have a large share in the administration. A State thus divided against itself
could not long resist the aggressive tendencies of powerful neighbours.
Artful diplomacy could but postpone the evil day, and it required no great
political foresight to predict that sooner or later Novgorod must become
Lithuanian or Muscovite. The great families inclined to Lithuania, but the
popular party and the clergy, disliking Roman Catholicism, looked to
Moscow for assistance, and the Grand Princes of Muscovy ultimately won
the prize.
The barbarous way in which the Grand Princes effected the annexation
shows how thoroughly they had imbibed the spirit of Tartar statesmanship.
Thousands of families were transported to Moscow, and Muscovite families
put in their places; and when, in spite of this, the old spirit revived, Ivan the
Terrible determined to apply the method of physical extermination which he
had found so effectual in breaking the power of his own nobles. Advancing
with a large army, which met with no resistance, he devastated the country
with fire and sword, and during a residence of five weeks in the town he put
the inhabitants to death with a ruthless ferocity which has perhaps never
been surpassed even by Oriental despots. If those old walls could speak
they would have many a horrible tale to tell. Enough has been preserved in
the chronicles to give us some idea of this awful time. Monks and priests
were subjected to the Tartar punishment called pravezh, which consisted in
tying the victim to a stake, and flogging him daily until a certain sum of
money was paid for his release. The merchants and officials were tortured
with fire, and then thrown from the bridge with their wives and children
into the river. Lest any of them should escape by swimming, boatfuls of
soldiers despatched those who were not killed by the fall. At the present day
there is a curious bubbling immediately below the bridge, which prevents
the water from freezing in winter, and according to popular belief this is
caused by the spirits of the terrible Tsar's victims. Of those who were
murdered in the villages there is no record, but in the town alone no less

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than 60,000 human beings are said to have been butchered—an awful
hecatomb on the altar of national unity and autocratic power!
This tragic scene, which occurred in 1570, closes the history of
Novgorod as an independent State. Its real independence had long since
ceased to exist, and now the last spark of the old spirit was extinguished.
The Tsars could not suffer even a shadow of political independence to exist
within their dominions.
In the old days, when many Hanseatic merchants annually visited the
city, and when the market-place, the bridge, and the Kremlin were often the
scene of violent political struggles, Novgorod must have been an interesting
place to live in; but now its glory has departed, and in respect of social
resources it is not even a first-rate provincial town. Kief, Kharkof, and other
towns which are situated at a greater distance from the capital, in districts
fertile enough to induce the nobles to farm their own land, are in their way
little semi-independent centres of civilisation. They contain a theatre, a
library, two or three clubs, and large houses belonging to rich landed
proprietors, who spend the summer on their estates and come into town for
the winter months. These proprietors, together with the resident officials,
form a numerous society, and during the winter, dinner-parties, balls, and
other social gatherings are by no means infrequent. In Novgorod the society
is much more limited. It does not, like Kief, Kharkof, and Kazan, possess a
university, and it contains no houses belonging to wealthy nobles. The few
proprietors of the province who live on their estates, and are rich enough to
spend part of the year in town, prefer St. Petersburg for their winter
residence. The society, therefore, is composed exclusively of the officials
and of the officers who happen to be quartered in the town or the immediate
vicinity.
Of all the people whose acquaintance I made at Novgorod, I can recall
only two men who did not occupy some official position, civil or military.
One of these was a retired doctor, who was attempting to farm on scientific
principles, and who, I believe, soon afterwards gave up the attempt and
migrated elsewhere. The other was a Polish bishop who had been
compromised in the insurrection of 1863, and was condemned to live here
under police supervision. This latter could scarcely be said to belong to the
society of the place; though he sometimes appeared at the unceremonious
weekly receptions given by the Governor, and was invariably treated by all

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present with marked respect, he could not but feel that he was in a false
position, and he was rarely or never seen in other houses.
The official circle of a town like Novgorod is sure to contain a good
many people of average education and agreeable manners, but it is sure to
be neither brilliant nor interesting. Though it is constantly undergoing a
gradual renovation by the received system of frequently transferring
officials from one town to another, it preserves faithfully, in spite of the new
blood which it thus receives, its essentially languid character. When a new
official arrives he exchanges visits with all the notables, and for a few days
he produces quite a sensation in the little community. If he appears at social
gatherings he is much talked to, and if he does not appear he is much talked
about. His former history is repeatedly narrated, and his various merits and
defects assiduously discussed.
If he is married, and has brought his wife with him, the field of comment
and discussion is very much enlarged. The first time that Madame appears
in society she is the "cynosure of neighbouring eyes." Her features, her
complexion, her hair, her dress, and her jewellery are carefully noted and
criticised. Perhaps she has brought with her, from the capital or from
abroad, some dresses of the newest fashion. As soon as this is discovered
she at once becomes an object of special curiosity to the ladies, and of
envious jealousy to those who regard as a personal grievance the presence
of a toilette finer or more fashionable than their own. Her demeanour, too,
is very carefully observed. If she is friendly and affable in manner, she is
patronised; if she is distant and reserved, she is condemned as proud and
pretentious. In either case she is pretty sure to form a close intimacy with
some one of the older female residents, and for a few weeks the two ladies
are inseparable, till some incautious word or act disturbs the new-born
friendship, and the devoted friends become bitter enemies. Voluntarily or
involuntarily the husbands get mixed up in the quarrel. Highly undesirable
qualities are discovered in the characters of all parties concerned, and are
made the subject of unfriendly comment. Then the feud subsides, and some
new feud of a similar kind comes to occupy the public attention. Mrs. A.
wonders how her friends Mr. and Mrs. B. can afford to lose considerable
sums every evening at cards, and suspects that they are getting into debt or
starving themselves and their children; in her humble opinion they would
do well to give fewer supper-parties, and to refrain from poisoning their
guests. The bosom friend to whom this is related retails it directly or

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indirectly to Mrs. B., and Mrs. B. naturally retaliates. Here is a new quarrel,
which for some time affords material for conversation.
When there is no quarrel, there is sure to be a bit of scandal afloat.
Though Russian provincial society is not at all prudish, and leans rather to
the side of extreme leniency, it cannot entirely overlook les convenances.
Madame C. has always a large number of male admirers, and to this there
can be no reasonable objection so long as her husband does not complain,
but she really parades her preference for Mr. X. at balls and parties a little
too conspicuously. Then there is Madame D., with the big dreamy eyes.
How can she remain in the place after her husband was killed in a duel by a
brother officer? Ostensibly the cause of the quarrel was a trifling incident at
the card-table, but every one knows that in reality she was the cause of the
deadly encounter. And so on, and so on. In the absence of graver interests
society naturally bestows inordinate attention on the private affairs of its
members; and quarrelling, backbiting, and scandal-mongery help indolent
people to kill the time that hangs heavily on their hands.
Potent as these instruments are, they are not sufficient to kill all the
leisure hours. In the forenoons the gentlemen are occupied with their
official duties, whilst the ladies go out shopping or pay visits, and devote
any time that remains to their household duties and their children; but the
day's work is over about four o'clock, and the long evening remains to be
filled up. The siesta may dispose of an hour or an hour and a half, but about
seven o'clock some definite occupation has to be found. As it is impossible
to devote the whole evening to discussing the ordinary news of the day,
recourse is almost invariably had to card-playing, which is indulged in to an
extent that we had no conception of in England until Bridge was imported.
Hour after hour the Russians of both sexes will sit in a hot room, filled with
a constantly-renewed cloud of tobacco-smoke—in the production of which
most of the ladies take part—and silently play "Preference," "Yarolash," or
Bridge. Those who for some reason are obliged to be alone can amuse
themselves with "Patience," in which no partner is required. In the other
games the stakes are commonly very small, but the sittings are often
continued so long that a player may win or lose two or three pounds
sterling. It is no unusual thing for gentlemen to play for eight or nine hours
at a time. At the weekly club dinners, before coffee had been served, nearly
all present used to rush off impatiently to the card-room, and sit there
placidly from five o'clock in the afternoon till one or two o'clock in the

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morning! When I asked my friends why they devoted so much time to this
unprofitable occupation, they always gave me pretty much the same
answer: "What are we to do? We have been reading or writing official
papers all day, and in the evening we like to have a little relaxation. When
we come together we have very little to talk about, for we have all read the
daily papers and nothing more. The best thing we can do is to sit down at
the card-table, where we can spend our time pleasantly, without the
necessity of talking."
In addition to the daily papers, some people read the monthly periodicals
—big, thick volumes, containing several serious articles on historical and
social subjects, sections of one or two novels, satirical sketches, and a long
review of home and foreign politics on the model of those in the Revue des
Deux Mondes. Several of these periodicals are very ably conducted, and
offer to their readers a large amount of valuable information; but I have
noticed that the leaves of the more serious part often remain uncut. The
translation of a sensation novel by the latest French or English favourite
finds many more readers than an article by an historian or a political
economist. As to books, they seem to be very little read, for during all the
time I lived in Novgorod I never discovered a bookseller's shop, and when I
required books I had to get them sent from St. Petersburg. The local
administration, it is true, conceived the idea of forming a museum and
circulating library, but in my time the project was never realised. Of all the
magnificent projects that are formed in Russia, only a very small percentage
come into existence, and these are too often very short-lived. The Russians
have learned theoretically what are the wants of the most advanced
civilisation, and are ever ready to rush into the grand schemes which their
theoretical knowledge suggests; but very few of them really and
permanently feel these wants, and consequently the institutions artificially
formed to satisfy them very soon languish and die. In the provincial towns
the shops for the sale of gastronomic delicacies spring up and flourish,
whilst shops for the sale of intellectual food are rarely to be met with.
About the beginning of December the ordinary monotony of Novgorod
life is a little relieved by the annual Provincial Assembly, which sits daily
for two or three weeks and discusses the economic wants of the province.*
During this time a good many landed proprietors, who habitually live on
their estates or in St. Petersburg, collect in the town, and enliven a little the
ordinary society. But as Christmas approaches the deputies disperse, and

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again the town becomes enshrouded in that "eternal stillness" (vetchnaya
tishina) which a native poet has declared to be the essential characteristic of
Russian provincial life.

* Of these Assemblies I shall have more to say when I come
to describe the local self-government.

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Page 195

CHAPTER XII
THE TOWNS AND THE MERCANTILE CLASSES

General Character of Russian Towns—Scarcity of Towns in Russia—
Why the Urban Element in the Population is so Small—History of Russian
Municipal Institutions—Unsuccessful Efforts to Create a Tiers-etat—
Merchants, Burghers, and Artisans—Town Council—A Rich Merchant—
His House—His Love of Ostentation—His Conception of Aristocracy—
Official Decorations—Ignorance and Dishonesty of the Commercial
Classes—Symptoms of Change.
Those who wish to enjoy the illusions produced by scene painting and
stage decorations should never go behind the scenes. In like manner he who
wishes to preserve the delusion that Russian provincial towns are
picturesque should never enter them, but content himself with viewing them
from a distance.
However imposing they may look when seen from the outside, they will
be found on closer inspection, with very few exceptions, to be little more
than villages in disguise. If they have not a positively rustic, they have at
least a suburban, appearance. The streets are straight and wide, and are
either miserably paved or not paved at all. Trottoirs are not considered
indispensable. The houses are built of wood or brick, generally one-storied,
and separated from each other by spacious yards. Many of them do not
condescend to turn their facades to the street. The general impression
produced is that the majority of the burghers have come from the country,
and have brought their country-houses with them. There are few or no
shops with merchandise tastefully arranged in the window to tempt the
passer-by. If you wish to make purchases you must go to the Gostinny
Dvor,* or Bazaar, which consists of long, symmetrical rows of low-roofed,
dimly-lighted stores, with a colonnade in front. This is the place where
merchants most do congregate, but it presents nothing of that bustle and
activity which we are accustomed to associate with commercial life. The
shopkeepers stand at their doors or loiter about in the immediate vicinity

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waiting for customers. From the scarcity of these latter I should say that
when sales are effected the profits must be enormous.

* These words mean literally the Guests' Court or Yard. The
Ghosti—a word which is etymologically the same as our
"host" and "guest"—were originally the merchants who traded
with other towns or other countries.

In the other parts of the town the air of solitude and languor is still more
conspicuous. In the great square, or by the side of the promenade—if the
town is fortunate enough to have one—cows or horses may be seen grazing
tranquilly, without being at all conscious of the incongruity of their
position. And, indeed, it would be strange if they had any such
consciousness, for it does not exist in the minds either of the police or of the
inhabitants. At night the streets may be lighted merely with a few oil-lamps,
which do little more than render the darkness visible, so that cautious
citizens returning home late often provide themselves with lanterns. As late
as the sixties the learned historian, Pogodin, then a town-councillor of
Moscow, opposed the lighting of the city with gas on the ground that those
who chose to go out at night should carry their lamps with them. The
objection was overruled, and Moscow is now fairly well lit, but the
provincial towns are still far from being on the same level. Some retain
their old primitive arrangements, while others enjoy the luxury of electric
lighting.
The scarcity of large towns in Russia is not less remarkable than their
rustic appearance. According to the last census (1897) the number of towns,
officially so-called, is 1,321, but about three-fifths of them have under
5,000 inhabitants; only 104 have over 25,000, and only 19 over 100,000.
These figures indicate plainly that the urban element of the population is
relatively small, and it is declared by the official statisticians to be only 14
per cent., as against 72 per cent. in Great Britain, but it is now increasing
rapidly. When the first edition of this work was published, in 1877,
European Russia in the narrower sense of the term—excluding Finland, the
Baltic Provinces, Lithuania, Poland, and the Caucasus—had only 11 towns
with a population of over 50,000, and now there are 34; that is to say, the
number of such towns has more than trebled. In the other portions of the
country a similar increase has taken place. The towns which have become
important industrial and commercial centres have naturally grown most
rapidly. For example, in a period of twelve years (1885-97) the populations

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of Lodz, of Ekaterinoslaf, of Baku, of Yaroslavl, and of Libau, have more
than doubled. In the five largest towns of the Empire—St. Petersburg,
Moscow, Warsaw, Odessa and Lodz—the aggregate population rose during
the same twelve years from 2,423,000 to 3,590,000, or nearly 50 per cent.
In ten other towns, with populations varying from 50,000 to 282,000, the
aggregate rose from 780,000 to 1,382,000, or about 77 per cent.
That Russia should have taken so long to assimilate herself in this respect
to Western Europe is to be explained by the geographical and political
conditions. Her population was not hemmed in by natural or artificial
frontiers strong enough to restrain their expansive tendencies. To the north,
the east, and the southeast there was a boundless expanse of fertile,
uncultivated land, offering a tempting field for emigration; and the
peasantry have ever shown themselves ready to take advantage of their
opportunities. Instead of improving their primitive system of agriculture,
which requires an enormous area and rapidly exhausts the soil, they have
always found it easier and more profitable to emigrate and take possession
of the virgin land beyond. Thus the territory—sometimes with the aid of,
and sometimes in spite of, the Government—has constantly expanded, and
has already reached the Polar Ocean, the Pacific, and the northern offshoots
of the Himalayas. The little district around the sources of the Dnieper has
grown into a mighty empire, comprising one-seventh of the land surface of
the globe. Prolific as the Russian race is, its power of reproduction could
not keep pace with its territorial expansion, and consequently the country is
still very thinly peopled. According to the latest census (1897) in the whole
empire there are under 130 millions of inhabitants, and the average density
of population is only about fifteen to the English square mile. Even the
most densely populated provinces, including Moscow with its 988,610
inhabitants, cannot show more than 189 to the English square mile, whereas
England has about 400. A people that has such an abundance of land, and
can support itself by agriculture, is not naturally disposed to devote itself to
industry, or to congregate in large cities.
For many generations there were other powerful influences working in
the same direction. Of these the most important was serfage, which was not
abolished till 1861. That institution, and the administrative system of which
it formed an essential part, tended to prevent the growth of the towns by
hemming the natural movements of the population. Peasants, for example,
who learned trades, and who ought to have drifted naturally into the burgher

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class, were mostly retained by the master on his estate, where artisans of all
sorts were daily wanted, and the few who were sent to seek work in the
towns were not allowed to settle there permanently.
Thus the insignificance of the Russian towns is to be attributed mainly to
two causes. The abundance of land tended to prevent the development of
industry, and the little industry which did exist was prevented by serfage
from collecting in the towns. But this explanation is evidently incomplete.
The same causes existed during the Middle Ages in Central Europe, and
yet, in spite of them, flourishing cities grew up and played an important part
in the social and political history of Germany. In these cities collected
traders and artisans, forming a distinct social class, distinguished from the
nobles on the one hand, and the surrounding peasantry on the other, by
peculiar occupations, peculiar aims, peculiar intellectual physiognomy, and
peculiar moral conceptions. Why did these important towns and this
burgher class not likewise come into existence in Russia, in spite of the two
preventive causes above mentioned?
To discuss this question fully it would be necessary to enter into certain
debated points of mediaeval history. All I can do here is to indicate what
seems to me the true explanation.
In Central Europe, all through the Middle Ages, a perpetual struggle went
on between the various political factors of which society was composed,
and the important towns were in a certain sense the products of this
struggle. They were preserved and fostered by the mutual rivalry of the
Sovereign, the Feudal Nobility, and the Church; and those who desired to
live by trade or industry settled in them in order to enjoy the protection and
immunities which they afforded. In Russia there was never any political
struggle of this kind. As soon as the Grand Princes of Moscow, in the
sixteenth century, threw off the yoke of the Tartars, and made themselves
Tsars of all Russia, their power was irresistible and uncontested. Complete
masters of the situation, they organised the country as they thought fit. At
first their policy was favourable to the development of the towns.
Perceiving that the mercantile and industrial classes might be made a rich
source of revenue, they separated them from the peasantry, gave them the
exclusive right of trading, prevented the other classes from competing with
them, and freed them from the authority of the landed proprietors. Had they
carried out this policy in a cautious, rational way, they might have created a

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rich burgher class; but they acted with true Oriental short-sightedness, and
defeated their own purpose by imposing inordinately heavy taxes, and
treating the urban population as their serfs. The richer merchants were
forced to serve as custom-house officers—often at a great distance from
their domiciles*—and artisans were yearly summoned to Moscow to do
work for the Tsars without remuneration.

* Merchants from Yaroslavl, for instance, were sent to
Astrakhan to collect the custom-dues.

Besides this, the system of taxation was radically defective, and the
members of the local administration, who received no pay and were
practically free from control, were merciless in their exactions. In a word,
the Tsars used their power so stupidly and so recklessly that the industrial
and trading population, instead of fleeing to the towns to secure protection,
fled from them to escape oppression. At length this emigration from the
towns assumed such dimensions that it was found necessary to prevent it by
administrative and legislative measures; and the urban population was
legally fixed in the towns as the rural population was fixed to the soil.
Those who fled were brought back as runaways, and those who attempted
flight a second time were ordered to be flogged and transported to Siberia.*

* See the "Ulozhenie" (i.e. the laws of Alexis, father of
Peter the Great), chap. xix. 13.

With the eighteenth century began a new era in the history of the towns
and of the urban population. Peter the Great observed, during his travels in
Western Europe, that national wealth and prosperity reposed chiefly on the
enterprising, educated middle classes, and he attributed the poverty of his
own country to the absence of this burgher element. Might not such a class
be created in Russia? Peter unhesitatingly assumed that it might, and set
himself at once to create it in a simple, straightforward way. Foreign
artisans were imported into his dominions and foreign merchants were
invited to trade with his subjects; young Russians were sent abroad to learn
the useful arts; efforts were made to disseminate practical knowledge by the
translation of foreign books and the foundation of schools; all kinds of trade
were encouraged, and various industrial enterprises were organised. At the
same time the administration of the towns was thoroughly reorganised after
the model of the ancient free-towns of Germany. In place of the old

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organisation, which was a slightly modified form of the rural Commune,
they received German municipal institutions, with burgomasters, town
councils, courts of justice, guilds for the merchants, trade corporations
(tsekhi) for the artisans, and an endless list of instructions regarding the
development of trade and industry, the building of hospitals, sanitary
precautions, the founding of schools, the dispensation of justice, the
organisation of the police, and similar matters.
Catherine II. followed in the same track. If she did less for trade and
industry, she did more in the way of legislating and writing grandiloquent
manifestoes. In the course of her historical studies she had learned, as she
proclaims in one of her manifestoes, that "from remotest antiquity we
everywhere find the memory of town-builders elevated to the same level as
the memory of legislators, and we see that heroes, famous for their
victories, hoped by town-building to give immortality to their names." As
the securing of immortality for her own name was her chief aim in life, she
acted in accordance with historical precedent, and created 216 towns in the
short space of twenty-three years. This seems a great work, but it did not
satisfy her ambition. She was not only a student of history, but was at the
same time a warm admirer of the fashionable political philosophy of her
time. That philosophy paid much attention to the tiers-etat, which was then
acquiring in France great political importance, and Catherine thought that as
she had created a Noblesse on the French model, she might also create a
bourgeoisie. For this purpose she modified the municipal organisation
created by her great predecessor, and granted to all the towns an Imperial
Charter. This charter remained without essential modification until the
publication of the new Municipality Law in 1870.
The efforts of the Government to create a rich, intelligent tiers-etat were
not attended with much success. Their influence was always more apparent
in official documents than in real life. The great mass of the population
remained serfs, fixed to the soil, whilst the nobles—that is to say, all who
possessed a little education—were required for the military and civil
services. Those who were sent abroad to learn the useful arts learned little,
and made little use of the knowledge which they acquired. On their return
to their native country they very soon fell victims to the soporific influence
of the surrounding social atmosphere. The "town-building" had as little
practical result. It was an easy matter to create any number of towns in the
official sense of the term. To transform a village into a town, it was

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necessary merely to prepare an izba, or log-house, for the district court,
another for the police-office, a third for the prison, and so on. On an
appointed day the Governor of the province arrived in the village, collected
the officials appointed to serve in the newly-constructed or newly-arranged
log-houses, ordered a simple religious ceremony to be performed by the
priest, caused a formal act to be drawn up, and then declared the town to be
"opened." All this required very little creative effort; to create a spirit of
commercial and industrial enterprise among the population was a more
difficult matter and could not be effected by Imperial ukaz.
To animate the newly-imported municipal institutions, which had no root
in the traditions and habits of the people, was a task of equal difficulty. In
the West these institutions had been slowly devised in the course of
centuries to meet real, keenly-felt, practical wants. In Russia they were
adopted for the purpose of creating those wants which were not yet felt. Let
the reader imagine our Board of Trade supplying the masters of fishing-
smacks with accurate charts, learned treatises on navigation, and detailed
instructions for the proper ventilation of ships' cabins, and he will have
some idea of the effect which Peter's legislation had upon the towns. The
office-bearers, elected against their will, were hopelessly bewildered by the
complicated procedure, and were incapable of understanding the numerous
ukazes which prescribed to them their multifarious duties and threatened
the most merciless punishments for sins of omission and commission. Soon,
however, it was discovered that the threats were not nearly so dreadful as
they seemed; and accordingly those municipal authorities who were to
protect and enlighten the burghers, "forgot the fear of God and the Tsar,"
and extorted so unblushingly that it was found necessary to place them
under the control of Government officials.
The chief practical result of the efforts made by Peter and Catherine to
create a bourgeoisie was that the inhabitants of the towns were more
systematically arranged in categories for the purpose of taxation, and that
the taxes were increased. All those parts of the new administration which
had no direct relation to the fiscal interests of the Government had very
little vitality in them. The whole system had been arbitrarily imposed on the
people, and had as motive only the Imperial will. Had that motive power
been withdrawn and the burghers left to regulate their own municipal
affairs, the system would immediately have collapsed. Rathhaus,
burgomasters, guilds, aldermen, and all the other lifeless shadows which

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had been called into existence by Imperial ukaz would instantly have
vanished into space. In this fact we have one of the characteristic traits of
Russian historical development compared with that of Western Europe. In
the West monarchy had to struggle with municipal institutions to prevent
them from becoming too powerful; in Russia, it had to struggle with them
to prevent them from committing suicide or dying of inanition.
According to Catherine's legislation, which remained in force until 1870,
and still exists in some of its main features, the towns were divided into
three categories: (1) Government towns (gubernskiye goroda)—that is to
say, the chief towns of provinces, or governments (gubernii)—in which are
concentrated the various organs of provincial administration; (2) district
towns (uyezdniye goroda), in which resides the administration of the
districts (uyezdi) into which the provinces are divided; and (3)
supernumerary towns (zashtatniye goroda), which have no particular
significance in the territorial administration.
In all these the municipal organisation is the same. Leaving out of
consideration those persons who happen to reside in the towns, but in
reality belong to the Noblesse, the clergy, or the lower ranks of officials, we
may say that the town population is composed of three groups: the
merchants (kuptsi), the burghers in the narrower sense of the term
(meshtchanye), and the artisans (tsekhoviye). These categories are not
hereditary castes, like the nobles, the clergy, and the peasantry. A noble may
become a merchant, or a man may be one year a burgher, the next year an
artisan, and the third year a merchant, if he changes his occupation and pays
the necessary dues. But the categories form, for the time being, distinct
corporations, each possessing a peculiar organisation and peculiar
privileges and obligations.
Of these three groups the first in the scale of dignity is that of the
merchants. It is chiefly recruited from the burghers and the peasantry. Any
one who wishes to engage in commerce inscribes himself in one of the three
guilds, according to the amount of his capital and the nature of the
operations in which he wishes to embark, and as soon as he has paid the
required dues he becomes officially a merchant. As soon as he ceases to pay
these dues he ceases to be a merchant in the legal sense of the term, and
returns to the class to which he formerly belonged. There are some families
whose members have belonged to the merchant class for several

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generations, and the law speaks about a certain "velvet-book" (barkhatnaya
kniga) in which their names should be inscribed, but in reality they do not
form a distinct category, and they descend at once from their privileged
position as soon as they cease to pay the annual guild dues.
The artisans form the connecting link between the town population and
the peasantry, for peasants often enrol themselves in the trades-
corporations, or tsekhi, without severing their connection with the rural
Communes to which they belong. Each trade or handicraft constitutes a
tsekh, at the head of which stands an elder and two assistants, elected by the
members; and all the tsekhi together form a corporation under an elected
head (remeslenny golova) assisted by a council composed of the elders of
the various tsekhi. It is the duty of this council and its president to regulate
all matters connected with the tsekhi, and to see that the multifarious
regulations regarding masters, journeymen, and apprentices are duly
observed.
The nondescript class, composed of those who are inscribed as
permanent inhabitants of the towns, but who do not belong to any guild or
tsekh, constitutes what is called the burghers in the narrower sense of the
term. Like the other two categories, they form a separate corporation, with
an elder and an administrative bureau.
Some idea of the relative numerical strength of these three categories
may be obtained from the following figures. Thirty years ago in European
Russia the merchant class (including wives and children) numbered about
466,000, the burghers about 4,033,000, and the artisans about 260,000. The
numbers according to the last census are not yet available.
In 1870 the entire municipal administration was reorganised on modern
West-European principles, and the Town Council (gorodskaya duma),
which formed under the previous system the connecting link between the
old-fashioned corporations, and was composed exclusively of members of
these bodies, became a genuine representative body composed of
householders, irrespective of the social class to which they might belong. A
noble, provided he was a house-proprietor, could become Town Councillor
or Mayor, and in this way a certain amount of vitality and a progressive
spirit were infused into the municipal administration. As a consequence of
this change the schools, hospitals, and other benevolent institutions were
much improved, the streets were kept cleaner and somewhat better paved,

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and for a time it seemed as if the towns in Russia might gradually rise to the
level of those of Western Europe. But the charm of novelty, which so often
works wonders in Russia, soon wore off. After a few years of strenuous
effort the best citizens no longer came forward as candidates, and the office-
bearers selected no longer displayed zeal and intelligence in the discharge
of their duties. In these circumstances the Government felt called upon
again to intervene. By a decree dated June 11, 1892, it introduced a new
series of reforms, by which the municipal self-government was placed more
under the direction and control of the centralised bureaucracy, and the
attendance of the Town Councillors at the periodical meetings was declared
to be obligatory, recalcitrant members being threatened with reprimands and
fines.
This last fact speaks volumes for the low vitality of the institutions and
the prevalent popular apathy with regard to municipal affairs. Nor was the
unsatisfactory state of things much improved by the new reforms; on the
contrary, the increased interference of the regular officials tended rather to
weaken the vitality of the urban self government, and the so-called reform
was pretty generally condemned as a needlessly reactionary measure. We
have here, in fact, a case of what has often occurred in the administrative
history of the Russian Empire since the time of Peter the Great, and to
which I shall again have occasion to refer. The central authority, finding
itself incompetent to do all that is required of it, and wishing to make a
display of liberalism, accords large concessions in the direction of local
autonomy; and when it discovers that the new institutions do not
accomplish all that was expected of them, and are not quite so subservient
and obsequious as is considered desirable, it returns in a certain measure to
the old principles of centralised bureaucracy.
The great development of trade and industry in recent years has of course
enriched the mercantile classes, and has introduced into them a more highly
educated element, drawn chiefly from the Noblesse, which formerly
eschewed such occupations; but it has not yet affected very deeply the mode
of life of those who have sprung from the old merchant families and the
peasantry. When a merchant, contractor, or manufacturer of the old type
becomes wealthy, he builds for himself a fine house, or buys and
thoroughly repairs the house of some ruined noble, and spends money
freely on parquetry floors, large mirrors, malachite tables, grand pianos by
the best makers, and other articles of furniture made of the most costly

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materials. Occasionally—especially on the occasion of a marriage or a
death in the family—he will give magnificent banquets, and expend
enormous sums on gigantic sterlets, choice sturgeons, foreign fruits,
champagne, and all manner of costly delicacies. But this lavish, ostentatious
expenditure does not affect the ordinary current of his daily life. As you
enter those gaudily furnished rooms you can perceive at a glance that they
are not for ordinary use. You notice a rigid symmetry and an indescribable
bareness which inevitably suggest that the original arrangements of the
upholsterer have never been modified or supplemented. The truth is that by
far the greater part of the house is used only on state occasions. The host
and his family live down-stairs in small, dirty rooms, furnished in a very
different, and for them more comfortable, style. At ordinary times the fine
rooms are closed, and the fine furniture carefully covered.
If you make a visite de politesse after an entertainment, you will probably
have some difficulty in gaining admission by the front door. When you have
knocked or rung several times, some one will come round from the back
regions and ask you what you want. Then follows another long pause, and
at last footsteps are heard approaching from within. The bolts are drawn, the
door is opened, and you are led up to a spacious drawing-room. At the wall
opposite the windows there is sure to be a sofa, and before it an oval table.
At each end of the table, and at right angles to the sofa, there will be a row
of three arm-chairs. The other chairs will be symmetrically arranged round
the room. In a few minutes the host will appear, in his long double-breasted
black coat and well-polished long boots. His hair is parted in the middle,
and his beard shows no trace of scissors or razor.
After the customary greetings have been exchanged, glasses of tea, with
slices of lemon and preserves, or perhaps a bottle of champagne, are
brought in by way of refreshments. The female members of the family you
must not expect to see, unless you are an intimate friend; for the merchants
still retain something of that female seclusion which was in vogue among
the upper classes before the time of Peter the Great. The host himself will
probably be an intelligent, but totally uneducated and decidedly taciturn,
man.
About the weather and the crops he may talk fluently enough, but he will
not show much inclination to go beyond these topics. You may, perhaps,
desire to converse with him on the subject with which he is best acquainted

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—the trade in which he is himself engaged; but if you make the attempt,
you will certainly not gain much information, and you may possibly meet
with such an incident as once happened to my travelling companion, a
Russian gentleman who had been commissioned by two learned societies to
collect information regarding the grain trade. When he called on a merchant
who had promised to assist him in his investigation, he was hospitably
received; but when he began to speak about the grain trade of the district
the merchant suddenly interrupted him, and proposed to tell him a story.
The story was as follows:
Once on a time a rich landed proprietor had a son, who was a thoroughly
spoilt child; and one day the boy said to his father that he wished all the
young serfs to come and sing before the door of the house. After some
attempts at dissuasion the request was granted, and the young people
assembled; but as soon as they began to sing, the boy rushed out and drove
them away.
When the merchant had told this apparently pointless story at great
length, and with much circumstantial detail, he paused a little, poured some
tea into his saucer, drank it off, and then inquired, "Now what do you think
was the reason of this strange conduct?"
My friend replied that the riddle surpassed his powers of divination.
"Well," said the merchant, looking hard at him, with a knowing grin,
"there was no reason; and all the boy could say was, 'Go away, go away!
I've changed my mind; I've changed my mind'" (poshli von; otkhotyel).
There was no possibility of mistaking the point of the story. My friend
took the hint and departed.
The Russian merchant's love of ostentation is of a peculiar kind—
something entirely different from English snobbery. He may delight in
gaudy reception-rooms, magnificent dinners, fast trotters, costly furs; or he
may display his riches by princely donations to churches, monasteries, or
benevolent institutions: but in all this he never affects to be other than he
really is. He habitually wears a costume which designates plainly his social
position; he makes no attempt to adopt fine manners or elegant tastes; and
he never seeks to gain admission to what is called in Russia la societe.
Having no desire to seem what he is not, he has a plain, unaffected manner,
and sometimes a quiet dignity which contrasts favourably with the affected
manner of those nobles of the lower ranks who make pretensions to being

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highly educated and strive to adopt the outward forms of French culture. At
his great dinners, it is true, the merchant likes to see among his guests as
many "generals"—that is to say, official personages—as possible, and
especially those who happen to have a grand cordon; but he never dreams
of thereby establishing an intimacy with these personages, or of being
invited by them in return. It is perfectly understood by both parties that
nothing of the kind is meant. The invitation is given and accepted from
quite different motives. The merchant has the satisfaction of seeing at his
table men of high official rank, and feels that the consideration which he
enjoys among people of his own class is thereby augmented. If he succeeds
in obtaining the presence of three generals, he obtains a victory over a rival
who cannot obtain more than two. The general, on his side, gets a first-rate
dinner, a la russe, and acquires an undefined right to request subscriptions
for public objects or benevolent institutions.
Of course this undefined right is commonly nothing more than a mere
tacit understanding, but in certain cases the subject is expressly mentioned.
I know of one case in which a regular bargain was made. A Moscow
magnate was invited by a merchant to a dinner, and consented to go in full
uniform, with all his decorations, on condition that the merchant should
subscribe a certain sum to a benevolent institution in which he was
particularly interested. It is whispered that such bargains are sometimes
made, not on behalf of benevolent institutions, but simply in the interest of
the gentleman who accepts the invitation. I cannot believe that there are
many official personages who would consent to let themselves out as table
decorations, but that it may happen is proved by the following incident,
which accidentally came to my knowledge. A rich merchant of the town of
T—— once requested the Governor of the Province to honour a family
festivity with his presence, and added that he would consider it a special
favour if the "Governoress" would enter an appearance. To this latter
request his Excellency made many objections, and at last let the petitioner
understand that her Excellency could not possibly be present, because she
had no velvet dress that could bear comparison with those of several
merchants' wives in the town. Two days after the interview a piece of the
finest velvet that could be procured in Moscow was received by the
Governor from an unknown donor, and his wife was thus enabled to be
present at the festivity, to the complete satisfaction of all parties concerned.

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It is worthy of remark that the merchants recognise no aristocracy but
that of official rank. Many merchants would willingly give twenty pounds
for the presence of an "actual State Councillor" who perhaps never heard of
his grandfather, but who can show a grand cordon; whilst they would not
give twenty pence for the presence of an undecorated Prince without
official rank, though he might be able to trace his pedigree up to the half-
mythical Rurik. Of the latter they would probably say, "Kto ikh znact?"
(Who knows what sort of a fellow he is?) The former, on the contrary,
whoever his father and grandfather may have been, possesses unmistakable
marks of the Tsar's favour, which, in the merchant's opinion, is infinitely
more important than any rights or pretensions founded on hereditary titles
or long pedigrees.
Some marks of Imperial favour the old-fashioned merchants strive to
obtain for themselves. They do not dream of grand cordons—that is far
beyond their most sanguine expectations—but they do all in their power to
obtain those lesser decorations which are granted to the mercantile class.
For this purpose the most common expedient is a liberal subscription to
some benevolent institution, and occasionally a regular bargain is made. I
know of at least one instance where the kind of decoration was expressly
stipulated. The affair illustrates so well the commercial character of these
transactions that I venture to state the facts as related to me by the official
chiefly concerned. A merchant subscribed to a society which enjoyed the
patronage of a Grand Duchess a considerable sum of money, under the
express condition that he should receive in return a St. Vladimir Cross.
Instead of the desired decoration, which was considered too much for the
sum subscribed, a cross of St. Stanislas was granted; but the donor was
dissatisfied with the latter and demanded that his money should be returned
to him. The demand had to be complied with, and, as an Imperial gift
cannot be retracted, the merchant had his Stanislas Cross for nothing.
This traffic in decorations has had its natural result. Like paper money
issued in too large quantities, the decorations have fallen in value. The gold
medals which were formerly much coveted and worn with pride by the rich
merchants—suspended by a ribbon round the neck—are now little sought
after. In like manner the inordinate respect for official personages has
considerably diminished. Fifty years ago the provincial merchants vied with
each other in their desire to entertain any great dignitary who honoured
their town with a visit, but now they seek rather to avoid this expensive and

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barren honour. When they do accept the honour, they fulfil the duties of
hospitality in a most liberal spirit. I have sometimes, when living as an
honoured guest in a rich merchant's house, found it difficult to obtain
anything simpler than sterlet, sturgeon, and champagne.
The two great blemishes on the character of the Russian merchants as a
class are, according to general opinion, their ignorance and their dishonesty.
As to the former of these there cannot possibly be any difference of opinion.
Many of them can neither read nor write, and are forced to keep their
accounts in their memory, or by means of ingenious hieroglyphics,
intelligible only to the inventor. Others can decipher the calendar and the
lives of the saints, can sign their names with tolerable facility, and can make
the simpler arithmetical calculations with the help of the stchety, a little
calculating instrument, composed of wooden balls strung on brass wires,
which resembles the "abaca" of the old Romans, and is universally used in
Russia. It is only the minority who understand the mysteries of regular
book-keeping, and of these very few can make any pretensions to being
educated men.
All this, however, is rapidly undergoing a radical change. Children are
now much better educated than their parents, and the next generation will
doubtless make further progress, so that the old-fashioned type above
described is destined to disappear. Already there are not a few of the
younger generation—especially among the wealthy manufacturers of
Moscow—who have been educated abroad, who may be described as tout a
fait civilises, and whose mode of life differs little from that of the richer
nobles; but they remain outside fashionable society, and constitute a "set" of
their own.
As to the dishonesty which is said to be so common among the Russian
commercial classes, it is difficult to form an accurate judgment. That an
enormous amount of unfair dealing does exist there can be no possible
doubt, but in this matter a foreigner is likely to be unduly severe. We are apt
to apply unflinchingly our own standard of commercial morality, and to
forget that trade in Russia is only emerging from that primitive condition in
which fixed prices and moderate profits are entirely unknown. And when
we happen to detect positive dishonesty, it seems to us especially heinous,
because the trickery employed is more primitive and awkward than that to
which we are accustomed. Trickery in weighing and measuring, for

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instance, which is by no means uncommon in Russia, is likely to make us
more indignant than those ingenious methods of adulteration which are
practised nearer home, and are regarded by many as almost legitimate.
Besides this, foreigners who go to Russia and embark in speculations
without possessing any adequate knowledge of the character, customs, and
language of the people positively invite spoliation, and ought to blame
themselves rather than the people who profit by their ignorance.
All this, and much more of the same kind, may be fairly urged in
mitigation of the severe judgments which foreign merchants commonly
pass on Russian commercial morality, but these judgments cannot be
reversed by such argumentation. The dishonesty and rascality which exist
among the merchants are fully recognised by the Russians themselves. In
all moral affairs the lower classes in Russia are very lenient in their
judgments, and are strongly disposed, like the Americans, to admire what is
called in Transatlantic phraseology "a smart man," though the smartness is
known to contain a large admixture of dishonesty; and yet the vox populi in
Russia emphatically declares that the merchants as a class are unscrupulous
and dishonest. There is a rude popular play in which the Devil, as principal
dramatis persona, succeeds in cheating all manner and conditions of men,
but is finally overreached by a genuine Russian merchant. When this play is
acted in the Carnival Theatre in St. Petersburg the audience invariably
agrees with the moral of the plot.
If this play were acted in the southern towns near the coast of the Black
Sea it would be necessary to modify it considerably, for here, in company
with Jews, Greeks, and Armenians, the Russian merchants seem honest by
comparison. As to Greeks and Armenians, I know not which of the two
nationalities deserves the palm, but it seems that both are surpassed by the
Children of Israel. "How these Jews do business," I have heard a Russian
merchant of this region exclaim, "I cannot understand. They buy up wheat
in the villages at eleven roubles per tchetvert, transport it to the coast at
their own expense, and sell it to the exporters at ten roubles! And yet they
contrive to make a profit! It is said that the Russian trader is cunning, but
here 'our brother' [i.e., the Russian] can do nothing." The truth of this
statement I have had abundant opportunities of confirming by personal
investigations on the spot.

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If I might express a general opinion regarding Russian commercial
morality, I should say that trade in Russia is carried on very much on the
same principle as horse-dealing in England. A man who wishes to buy or
sell must trust to his own knowledge and acuteness, and if he gets the worst
of a bargain or lets himself be deceived, he has himself to blame.
Commercial Englishmen on arriving in Russia rarely understand this, and
when they know it theoretically they are too often unable, from their
ignorance of the language, the laws, and the customs of the people, to turn
their theoretical knowledge to account. They indulge, therefore, at first in
endless invectives against the prevailing dishonesty; but gradually, when
they have paid what Germans call Lehrgeld, they accommodate themselves
to circumstances, take large profits to counterbalance bad debts, and
generally succeed—if they have sufficient energy, mother-wit, and capital—
in making a very handsome income.
The old race of British merchants, however, is rapidly dying out, and I
greatly fear that the rising generation will not be equally successful. Times
have changed. It is no longer possible to amass large fortunes in the old
easy-going fashion. Every year the conditions alter, and the competition
increases. In order to foresee, understand, and take advantage of the
changes, one must have far more knowledge of the country than the men of
the old school possessed, and it seems to me that the young generation have
still less of that knowledge than their predecessors. Unless some change
takes place in this respect, the German merchants, who have generally a
much better commercial education and are much better acquainted with
their adopted country, will ultimately, I believe, expel their British rivals.
Already many branches of commerce formerly carried on by Englishmen
have passed into their hands.
It must not be supposed that the unsatisfactory organisation of the
Russian commercial world is the result of any radical peculiarity of the
Russian character. All new countries have to pass through a similar state of
things, and in Russia there are already premonitory symptoms of a change
for the better. For the present, it is true, the extensive construction of
railways and the rapid development of banks and limited liability
companies have opened up a new and wide field for all kinds of commercial
swindling; but, on the other hand, there are now in every large town a
certain number of merchants who carry on business in the West-European
manner, and have learnt by experience that honesty is the best policy. The

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success which many of these have obtained will doubtless cause their
example to be followed. The old spirit of caste and routine which has long
animated the merchant class is rapidly disappearing, and not a few nobles
are now exchanging country life and the service of the State for industrial
and commercial enterprises. In this way is being formed the nucleus of that
wealthy, enlightened bourgeoisie which Catherine endeavoured to create by
legislation; but many years must elapse before this class acquires sufficient
social and political significance to deserve the title of a tiers-etat.

Page 213

CHAPTER XIII
THE PASTORAL TRIBES OF THE STEPPE

A Journey to the Steppe Region of the Southeast—The Volga—Town and
Province of Samara—Farther Eastward—Appearance of the Villages—
Characteristic Incident—Peasant Mendacity—Explanation of the
Phenomenon—I Awake in Asia—A Bashkir Aoul—Diner la Tartare—
Kumyss—A Bashkir Troubadour—Honest Mehemet Zian—Actual
Economic Condition of the Bashkirs Throws Light on a Well-known
Philosophical Theory—Why a Pastoral Race Adopts Agriculture—The
Genuine Steppe—The Kirghiz—Letter from Genghis Khan—The Kalmyks
—Nogai Tartars—Struggle between Nomadic Hordes and Agricultural
Colonists.
When I had spent a couple of years or more in the Northern and North-
Central provinces—the land of forests and of agriculture conducted on the
three-field system, with here and there a town of respectable antiquity—I
determined to visit for purposes of comparison and contrast the
Southeastern region, which possesses no forests nor ancient towns, and
corresponds to the Far West of the United States of America. My point of
departure was Yaroslavl, a town on the right bank of the Volga to the
northeast of Moscow—and thence I sailed down the river during three days
on a large comfortable steamer to Samara, the chief town of the province or
"government" of the name. Here I left the steamer and prepared to make a
journey into the eastern hinterland.
Samara is a new town, a child of the last century. At the time of my first
visit, now thirty years ago, it recalled by its unfinished appearance the new
towns of America. Many of the houses were of wood. The streets were still
in such a primitive condition that after rain they were almost impassable
from mud, and in dry, gusty weather they generated thick clouds of
blinding, suffocating dust. Before I had been many days in the place I
witnessed a dust-hurricane, during which it was impossible at certain
moments to see from my window the houses on the other side of the street.
Amidst such primitive surroundings the colossal new church seemed a little

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out of keeping, and it occurred to my practical British mind that some of the
money expended on its construction might have been more profitably
employed. But the Russians have their own ideas of the fitness of things.
Religious after their own fashion, they subscribe money liberally for
ecclesiastical purposes—especially for the building and decoration of their
churches. Besides this, the Government considers that every chief town of a
province should possess a cathedral.
In its early days Samara was one of the outposts of Russian colonisation,
and had often to take precautions against the raids of the nomadic tribes
living in the vicinity; but the agricultural frontier has since been pushed far
forward to the east and south, and the province was until lately, despite
occasional droughts, one of the most productive in the Empire. The town is
the chief market of this region, and therein lies its importance. The grain is
brought by the peasants from great distances, and stored in large granaries
by the merchants, who send it to Moscow or St. Petersburg. In former days
this was a very tedious operation. The boats containing the grain were
towed by horses or stout peasants up the rivers and through the canals for
hundreds of miles. Then came the period of "cabestans"—unwieldly
machines propelled by means of anchors and windlasses. Now these
primitive methods of transport have disappeared. The grain is either
despatched by rail or put into gigantic barges, which are towed up the river
by powerful tug-steamers to some point connected with the great network
of railways.
When the traveller has visited the Cathedral and the granaries he has seen
all the lions—not very formidable lions, truly—of the place. He may then
inspect the kumyss establishments, pleasantly situated near the town. He
will find there a considerable number of patients—mostly consumptive—
who drink enormous quantities of fermented mare's-milk, and who declare
that they receive great benefit from this modern health-restorer.
What interested me more than the lions of the town or the suburban
kumyss establishments were the offices of the local administration, where I
found in the archives much statistical and other information of the kind I
was in search of, regarding the economic condition of the province
generally, and of the emancipated peasantry in particular. Having filled my
note-book with material of this sort, I proceeded to verify and complete it
by visiting some characteristic villages and questioning the inhabitants. For

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the student of Russian affairs who wishes to arrive at real, as distinguished
from official, truth, this is not an altogether superfluous operation.
When I had thus made the acquaintance of the sedentary agricultural
population in several districts I journeyed eastwards with the intention of
visiting the Bashkirs, a Tartar tribe which still preserved—so at least I was
assured—its old nomadic habits. My reasons for undertaking this journey
were twofold. In the first place I was desirous of seeing with my own eyes
some remnants of those terrible nomadic tribes which had at one time
conquered Russia and long threatened to overrun Europe—those Tartar
hordes which gained, by their irresistible force and relentless cruelty, the
reputation of being "the scourge of God." Besides this, I had long wished to
study the conditions of pastoral life, and congratulated myself on having
found a convenient opportunity of doing so.
As I proceeded eastwards I noticed a change in the appearance of the
villages. The ordinary wooden houses, with their high sloping roofs,
gradually gave place to flat-roofed huts, built of a peculiar kind of unburnt
bricks, composed of mud and straw. I noticed, too, that the population
became less and less dense, and the amount of fallow land proportionately
greater. The peasants were evidently richer than those near the Volga, but
they complained—as the Russian peasant always does—that they had not
land enough. In answer to my inquiries why they did not use the thousands
of acres that were lying fallow around them, they explained that they had
already raised crops on that land for several successive years, and that
consequently they must now allow it to "rest."
In one of the villages through which I passed I met with a very
characteristic little incident. The village was called Samovolnaya Ivanofka
—that is to say, "Ivanofka the Self-willed" or "the Non-authorised." Whilst
our horses were being changed my travelling companion, in the course of
conversation with a group of peasants, inquired about the origin of this
extraordinary name, and discovered a curious bit of local history. The
founders of the village had settled on the land without the permission of the
absentee owner, and obstinately resisted all attempts at eviction. Again and
again troops had been sent to drive them away, but as soon as the troops
retired these "self-willed" people returned and resumed possession, till at
last the proprietor, who lived in St. Petersburg or some other distant place,
became weary of the contest and allowed them to remain. The various

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incidents were related with much circumstantial detail, so that the narration
lasted perhaps half an hour. All this time I listened attentively, and when the
story was finished I took out my note-book in order to jot down the facts,
and asked in what year the affair had happened. No answer was given to my
question. The peasants merely looked at each other in a significant way and
kept silence. Thinking that my question had not been understood, I asked it
a second time, repeating a part of what had been related. To my
astonishment and utter discomfiture they all declared that they had never
related anything of the sort! In despair I appealed to my friend, and asked
him whether my ears had deceived me—whether I was labouring under
some strange hallucination. Without giving me any reply he simply smiled
and turned away.
When we had left the village and were driving along in our tarantass the
mystery was satisfactorily cleared up. My friend explained to me that I had
not at all misunderstood what had been related, but that my abrupt question
and the sight of my note-book had suddenly aroused the peasants'
suspicions. "They evidently suspected," he continued, "that you were a
tchinovnik, and that you wished to use to their detriment the knowledge you
had acquired. They thought it safer, therefore, at once to deny it all. You
don't yet understand the Russian muzhik!"
In this last remark I was obliged to concur, but since that time I have
come to know the muzhik better, and an incident of the kind would now no
longer surprise me. From a long series of observations I have come to the
conclusion that the great majority of the Russian peasants, when dealing
with the authorities, consider the most patent and barefaced falsehoods as a
fair means of self-defence. Thus, for example, when a muzhik is implicated
in a criminal affair, and a preliminary investigation is being made, he
probably begins by constructing an elaborate story to explain the facts and
exculpate himself. The story may be a tissue of self-evident falsehoods from
beginning to end, but he defends it valiantly as long as possible. When he
perceives that the position which he has taken up is utterly untenable, he
declares openly that all he has said is false, and that he wishes to make a
new declaration. This second declaration may have the same fate as the
former one, and then he proposes a third. Thus groping his way, he tries
various stories till he finds one that seems proof against all objections. In
the fact of his thus telling lies there is of course nothing remarkable, for
criminals in all parts of the world have a tendency to deviate from the truth

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when they fall into the hands of justice. The peculiarity is that he retracts
his statements with the composed air of a chess-player who requests his
opponent to let him take back an inadvertent move. Under the old system of
procedure, which was abolished in the sixties, clever criminals often
contrived by means of this simple device to have their trial postponed for
many years.
Such incidents naturally astonish a foreigner, and he is apt, in
consequence, to pass a very severe judgment on the Russian peasantry in
general. The reader may remember Karl Karl'itch's remarks on the subject.
These remarks I have heard repeated in various forms by Germans in all
parts of the country, and there must be a certain amount of truth in them, for
even an eminent Slavophil once publicly admitted that the peasant is prone
to perjury.* It is necessary, however, as it seems to me, to draw a
distinction. In the ordinary intercourse of peasants among themselves, or
with people in whom they have confidence, I do not believe that the habit of
lying is abnormally developed. It is only when the muzhik comes in contact
with authorities that he shows himself an expert fabricator of falsehoods. In
this there is nothing that need surprise us. For ages the peasantry were
exposed to the arbitrary power and ruthless exactions of those who were
placed over them; and as the law gave them no means of legally protecting
themselves, their only means of self-defence lay in cunning and deceit.

* Kireyefski, in the Russakaya Beseda.

We have here, I believe, the true explanation of that "Oriental mendacity"
about which Eastern travellers have written so much. It is simply the result
of a lawless state of society. Suppose a truth-loving Englishman falls into
the hands of brigands or savages. Will he not, if he have merely an ordinary
moral character, consider himself justified in inventing a few falsehoods in
order to effect his escape? If so, we have no right to condemn very severely
the hereditary mendacity of those races which have lived for many
generations in a position analogous to that of the supposed Englishman
among brigands. When legitimate interests cannot be protected by
truthfulness and honesty, prudent people always learn to employ means
which experience has proved to be more effectual. In a country where the
law does not afford protection, the strong man defends himself by his
strength, the weak by cunning and duplicity. This fully explains the fact that
in Turkey the Christians are less truthful than the Mahometans.

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But we have wandered a long way from the road to Bashkiria. Let us
therefore return at once.
Of all the journeys which I made in Russia this was one of the most
agreeable. The weather was bright and warm, without being unpleasantly
hot; the roads were tolerably smooth; the tarantass, which had been hired
for the whole journey, was nearly as comfortable as a tarantass can be; good
milk, eggs, and white bread could be obtained in abundance; there was not
much difficulty in procuring horses in the villages through which we
passed, and the owners of them were not very extortionate in their demands.
But what most contributed to my comfort was that I was accompanied by an
agreeable, intelligent young Russian, who kindly undertook to make all the
necessary arrangements, and I was thereby freed from those annoyances
and worries which are always encountered in primitive countries where
travelling is not yet a recognised institution. To him I left the entire control
of our movements, passively acquiescing in everything, and asking no
questions as to what was coming. Taking advantage of my passivity, he
prepared for me one evening a pleasant little surprise.
About sunset we had left a village called Morsha, and shortly afterwards,
feeling drowsy, and being warned by my companion that we should have a
long, uninteresting drive, I had lain down in the tarantass and gone to sleep.
On awaking I found that the tarantass had stopped, and that the stars were
shining brightly overhead. A big dog was barking furiously close at hand,
and I heard the voice of the yamstchik informing us that we had arrived. I at
once sat up and looked about me, expecting to see a village of some kind,
but instead of that I perceived a wide open space, and at a short distance a
group of haystacks. Close to the tarantass stood two figures in long cloaks,
armed with big sticks, and speaking to each other in an unknown tongue.
My first idea was that we had been somehow led into a trap, so I drew my
revolver in order to be ready for all emergencies. My companion was still
snoring loudly by my side, and stoutly resisted all my efforts to awaken
him.
"What's this?" I said, in a gruff, angry voice, to the yamstchik. "Where
have you taken us to?"
"To where I was ordered, master!"
For the purpose of getting a more satisfactory explanation I took to
shaking my sleepy companion, but before he had returned to consciousness

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the moon shone out brightly from behind a thick bank of clouds, and
cleared up the mystery. The supposed haystacks turned out to be tents. The
two figures with long sticks, whom I had suspected of being brigands, were
peaceable shepherds, dressed in the ordinary Oriental khalát, and tending
their sheep, which were grazing close by. Instead of being in an empty hay-
field, as I had imagined, we had before us a regular Tartar aoul, such as I
had often read about. For a moment I felt astonished and bewildered. It
seemed to me that I had fallen asleep in Europe and woke up in Asia!
In a few minutes we were comfortably installed in one of the tents, a
circular, cupola-shaped erection, of about twelve feet in diameter, composed
of a frame-work of light wooden rods covered with thick felt. It contained
no furniture, except a goodly quantity of carpets and pillows, which had
been formed into a bed for our accommodation. Our amiable host, who was
evidently somewhat astonished at our unexpected visit, but refrained from
asking questions, soon bade us good-night and retired. We were not,
however, left alone. A large number of black beetles remained and gave us a
welcome in their own peculiar fashion. Whether they were provided with
wings, or made up for the want of flying appliances by crawling up the
sides of the tent and dropping down on any object they wished to reach, I
did not discover, but certain it is that they somehow reached our heads—
even when we were standing upright—and clung to our hair with wonderful
tenacity. Why they should show such a marked preference for human hair
we could not conjecture, till it occurred to us that the natives habitually
shaved their heads, and that these beetles must naturally consider a hair-
covered cranium a curious novelty deserving of careful examination. Like
all children of nature they were decidedly indiscreet and troublesome in
their curiosity, but when the light was extinguished they took the hint and
departed.
When we awoke next morning it was broad daylight, and we found a
crowd of natives in front of the tent. Our arrival was evidently regarded as
an important event, and all the inhabitants of the aoul were anxious to make
our acquaintance. First our host came forward. He was a short, slimly-built
man, of middle age, with a grave, severe expression, indicating an
unsociable disposition. We afterwards learned that he was an akhun*—that
is to say, a minor officer of the Mahometan ecclesiastical administration,
and at the same time a small trader in silken and woollen stuffs. With him
came the mullah, or priest, a portly old gentleman with an open, honest face

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of the European type, and a fine grey beard. The other important members
of the little community followed. They were all swarthy in colour, and had
the small eyes and prominent cheek-bones which are characteristic of the
Tartar races, but they had little of that flatness of countenance and peculiar
ugliness which distinguish the pure Mongol. All of them, with the exception
of the mullah, spoke a little Russian, and used it to assure us that we were
welcome. The children remained respectfully in the background, and the
women, with faces veiled, eyed us furtively from the doors of the tents.

* I presume this is the same word as akhund, well known on
the Northwest frontier of India, where it was applied
specially to the late ruler of Svat.

The aoul consisted of about twenty tents, all constructed on the same
model, and scattered about in sporadic fashion, without the least regard to
symmetry. Close by was a watercourse, which appears on some maps as a
river, under the name of Karalyk, but which was at that time merely a
succession of pools containing a dark-coloured liquid. As we more than
suspected that these pools supplied the inhabitants with water for culinary
purposes, the sight was not calculated to whet our appetites. We turned
away therefore hurriedly, and for want of something better to do we
watched the preparations for dinner. These were decidedly primitive. A
sheep was brought near the door of our tent, and there killed, skinned, cut
up into pieces, and put into an immense pot, under which a fire had been
kindled.
The dinner itself was not less primitive than the manner of preparing it.
The table consisted of a large napkin spread in the middle of the tent, and
the chairs were represented by cushions, on which we sat cross-legged.
There were no plates, knives, forks, spoons, or chopsticks. Guests were
expected all to eat out of a common wooden bowl, and to use the
instruments with which Nature had provided them. The service was
performed by the host and his son. The fare was copious, but not varied—
consisting entirely of boiled mutton, without bread or other substitute, and a
little salted horse-flesh thrown in as an entree.
To eat out of the same dish with half-a-dozen Mahometans who accept
their Prophet's injunction about ablutions in a highly figurative sense, and
who are totally unacquainted with the use of forks and spoons, is not an
agreeable operation, even if one is not much troubled with religious

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prejudices; but with these Bashkirs something worse than this has to be
encountered, for their favourite method of expressing their esteem and
affection for one with whom they are eating consists in putting bits of
mutton, and sometimes even handfuls of hashed meat, into his month!
When I discovered this unexpected peculiarity in Bashkir manners and
customs, I almost regretted that I had made a favourable impression upon
my new acquaintances.
When the sheep had been devoured, partly by the company in the tent
and partly by a nondescript company outside—for the whole aoul took part
in the festivities—kumyss was served in unlimited quantities. This
beverage, as I have already explained, is mare's milk fermented; but what
here passed under the name was very different from the kumyss I had tasted
in the establissements of Samara. There it was a pleasant effervescing drink,
with only the slightest tinge of acidity; here it was a "still" liquid, strongly
resembling very thin and very sour butter-milk. My Russian friend made a
wry face on first tasting it, and I felt inclined at first to do likewise, but
noticing that his grimaces made an unfavourable impression on the
audience, I restrained my facial muscles, and looked as if I liked it. Very
soon I really came to like it, and learned to "drink fair" with those who had
been accustomed to it from their childhood. By this feat I rose considerably
in the estimation of the natives; for if one does not drink kumyss one cannot
be sociable in the Bashkir sense of the term, and by acquiring the habit one
adopts an essential principle of Bashkir nationality. I should certainly have
preferred having a cup of it to myself, but I thought it well to conform to the
habits of the country, and to accept the big wooden bowl when it was
passed round. In return my friends made an important concession in my
favour: they allowed me to smoke as I pleased, though they considered that,
as the Prophet had refrained from tobacco, ordinary mortals should do the
same.
Whilst the "loving-cup" was going round I distributed some small
presents which I had brought for the purpose, and then proceeded to explain
the object of my visit. In the distant country from which I came—far away
to the westward—I had heard of the Bashkirs as a people possessing many
strange customs, but very kind and hospitable to strangers. Of their
kindness and hospitality I had already learned something by experience, and
I hoped they would allow me to learn something of their mode of life, their

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customs, their songs, their history, and their religion, in all of which I
assured them my distant countrymen took a lively interest.
This little after-dinner speech was perhaps not quite in accordance with
Bashkir etiquette, but it made a favourable impression. There was a decided
murmur of approbation, and those who understood Russian translated my
words to their less accomplished brethren. A short consultation ensued, and
then there was a general shout of "Abdullah! Abdullah!" which was taken
up and repeated by those standing outside.
In a few minutes Abdullah appeared, with a big, half-picked bone in his
hand, and the lower part of his face besmeared with grease. He was a short,
thin man, with a dark, sallow complexion, and a look of premature old age;
but the suppressed smile that played about his mouth and a tremulous
movement of his right eye-lid showed plainly that he had not yet forgotten
the fun and frolic of youth. His dress was of richer and more gaudy
material, but at the same time more tawdry and tattered, than that of the
others. Altogether he looked like an artiste in distressed circumstances, and
such he really was. At a word and a sign from the host he laid aside his
bone and drew from under his green silk khalát a small wind-instrument
resembling a flute or flageolet. On this he played a number of native airs.
The first melodies which he played reminded me of a Highland pibroch—at
one moment low, solemn, and plaintive, then gradually rising into a soul-
stirring, martial strain, and again descending to a plaintive wail. The amount
of expression which he put into his simple instrument was truly marvellous.
Then, passing suddenly from grave to gay, he played a series of light, merry
airs, and some of the younger onlookers got up and performed a dance as
boisterous and ungraceful as an Irish jig.
This Abdullah turned out to be for me a most valuable acquaintance. He
was a kind of Bashkir troubadour, well acquainted not only with the music,
but also with the traditions, the history, the superstitions, and the folk-lore
of his people. By the akhun and the mullah he was regarded as a frivolous,
worthless fellow, who had no regular, respectable means of gaining a
livelihood, but among the men of less rigid principles he was a general
favourite. As he spoke Russian fluently I could converse with him freely
without the aid of an interpreter, and he willingly placed his store of
knowledge at my disposal. When in the company of the akhun he was

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always solemn and taciturn, but as soon as he was relieved of that
dignitary's presence he became lively and communicative.
Another of my new acquaintances was equally useful to me in another
way. This was Mehemet Zian, who was not so intelligent as Abdullah, but
much more sympathetic. In his open, honest face, and kindly, unaffected
manner there was something so irresistibly attractive that before I had
known him twenty-four hours a sort of friendship had sprung up between
us. He was a tall, muscular, broad-shouldered man, with features that
suggested a mixture of European blood. Though already past middle age, he
was still wiry and active—so active that he could, when on horseback, pick
a stone off the ground without dismounting. He could, however, no longer
perform this feat at full gallop, as he had been wont to do in his youth. His
geographical knowledge was extremely limited and inaccurate—his mind
being in this respect like those old Russian maps in which the nations of the
earth and a good many peoples who had never more than a mythical
existence are jumbled together in hopeless confusion—but his geographical
curiosity was insatiable. My travelling-map—the first thing of the kind he
had ever seen—interested him deeply. When he found that by simply
examining it and glancing at my compass I could tell him the direction and
distance of places he knew, his face was like that of a child who sees for the
first time a conjuror's performance; and when I explained the trick to him,
and taught him to calculate the distance to Bokhara—the sacred city of the
Mussulmans of that region—his delight was unbounded. Gradually I
perceived that to possess such a map had become the great object of his
ambition. Unfortunately I could not at once gratify him as I should have
wished, because I had a long journey before me and I had no other map of
the region, but I promised to find ways and means of sending him one, and I
kept my word by means of a native of the Karalyk district whom I
discovered in Samara. I did not add a compass because I could not find one
in the town, and it would have been of little use to him: like a true child of
nature he always knew the cardinal points by the sun or the stars. Some
years later I had the satisfaction of learning that the map had reached its
destination safely, through no less a personage than Count Tolstoy. One
evening at the home of a friend in Moscow I was presented to the great
novelist, and as soon as he heard my name he said: "Oh! I know you
already, and I know your friend Mehemet Zian. When I passed a night this

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summer in his aoul he showed me a map with your signature on the margin,
and taught me how to calculate the distance to Bokhara!"
If Mehemet knew little of foreign countries he was thoroughly well
acquainted with his own, and repaid me most liberally for my elementary
lessons in geography. With him I visited the neighbouring aouls. In all of
them he had numerous acquaintances, and everywhere we were received
with the greatest hospitality, except on one occasion when we paid a visit of
ceremony to a famous robber who was the terror of the whole
neighbourhood. Certainly he was one of the most brutalised specimens of
humanity I have ever encountered. He made no attempt to be amiable, and I
felt inclined to leave his tent at once; but I saw that my friend wanted to
conciliate him, so I restrained my feelings and eventually established
tolerably good relations with him. As a rule I avoided festivities, partly
because I knew that my hosts were mostly poor and would not accept
payment for the slaughtered sheep, and partly because I had reason to
apprehend that they would express to me their esteem and affection more
Bashkirico; but in kumyss-drinking, the ordinary occupation of these people
when they have nothing to do, I had to indulge to a most inordinate extent.
On these expeditions Abdullah generally accompanied us, and rendered
valuable service as interpreter and troubadour. Mehemet could express
himself in Russian, but his vocabulary failed him as soon as the
conversation ran above very ordinary topics; Abdullah, on the contrary, was
a first-rate interpreter, and under the influence of his musical pipe and lively
talkativeness new acquaintances became sociable and communicative. Poor
Abdullah! He was a kind of universal genius; but his faded, tattered khalát
showed only too plainly that in Bashkiria, as in more civilised countries,
universal genius and the artistic temperament lead to poverty rather than to
wealth.
I have no intention of troubling the reader with the miscellaneous facts
which, with the assistance of these two friends, I succeeded in collecting—
indeed, I could not if I would, for the notes I then made were afterwards lost
—but I wish to say a few words about the actual economic condition of the
Bashkirs. They are at present passing from pastoral to agricultural life; and
it is not a little interesting to note the causes which induce them to make
this change, and the way in which it is made.

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Philosophers have long held a theory of social development according to
which men were at first hunters, then shepherds, and lastly agriculturists.
How far this theory is in accordance with reality we need not for the present
inquire, but we may examine an important part of it and ask ourselves the
question, Why did pastoral tribes adopt agriculture? The common
explanation is that they changed their mode of life in consequence of some
ill-defined, fortuitous circumstances. A great legislator arose amongst them
and taught them to till the soil, or they came in contact with an agricultural
race and adopted the customs of their neighbours. Such explanations must
appear unsatisfactory to any one who has lived with a pastoral people.
Pastoral life is so incomparably more agreeable than the hard lot of the
agriculturist, and so much more in accordance with the natural indolence of
human nature, that no great legislator, though he had the wisdom of a Solon
and the eloquence of a Demosthenes, could possibly induce his fellow-
countrymen to pass voluntarily from the one to the other. Of all the ordinary
means of gaining a livelihood—with the exception perhaps of mining—
agriculture is the most laborious, and is never voluntarily adopted by men
who have not been accustomed to it from their childhood. The life of a
pastoral race, on the contrary, is a perennial holiday, and I can imagine
nothing except the prospect of starvation which could induce men who live
by their flocks and herds to make the transition to agricultural life.
The prospect of starvation is, in fact, the cause of the transition—
probably in all cases, and certainly in the case of the Bashkirs. So long as
they had abundance of pasturage they never thought of tilling the soil. Their
flocks and herds supplied them with all that they required, and enabled
them to lead a tranquil, indolent existence. No great legislator arose among
them to teach them the use of the plough and the sickle, and when they saw
the Russian peasants on their borders laboriously ploughing and reaping,
they looked on them with compassion, and never thought of following their
example. But an impersonal legislator came to them—a very severe and
tyrannical legislator, who would not brook disobedience—I mean Economic
Necessity. By the encroachments of the Ural Cossacks on the east, and by
the ever-advancing wave of Russian colonisation from the north and west,
their territory had been greatly diminished. With diminution of the
pasturage came diminution of the live stock, their sole means of
subsistence. In spite of their passively conservative spirit they had to look
about for some new means of obtaining food and clothing—some new

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mode of life requiring less extensive territorial possessions. It was only then
that they began to think of imitating their neighbours. They saw that the
neighbouring Russian peasant lived comfortably on thirty or forty acres of
land, whilst they possessed a hundred and fifty acres per male, and were in
danger of starvation.
The conclusion to be drawn from this was self-evident—they ought at
once to begin ploughing and sowing. But there was a very serious obstacle
to the putting of this principle in practice. Agriculture certainly requires less
land than sheep-farming, but it requires very much more labour, and to hard
work the Bashkirs were not accustomed. They could bear hardships and
fatigues in the shape of long journeys on horseback, but the severe,
monotonous labour of the plough and the sickle was not to their taste. At
first, therefore, they adopted a compromise. They had a portion of their land
tilled by Russian peasants, and ceded to these a part of the produce in return
for the labour expended; in other words, they assumed the position of
landed proprietors, and farmed part of their land on the metayage system.
The process of transition had reached this point in several aouls which I
visited. My friend Mehemet Zian showed me at some distance from the
tents his plot of arable land, and introduced me to the peasant who tilled it
—a Little-Russian, who assured me that the arrangement satisfied all
parties. The process of transition cannot, however, stop here. The
compromise is merely a temporary expedient. Virgin soil gives very
abundant harvests, sufficient to support both the labourer and the indolent
proprietor, but after a few years the soil becomes exhausted and gives only
a very moderate revenue. A proprietor, therefore, must sooner or later
dispense with the labourers who take half of the produce as their
recompense, and must himself put his hand to the plough.
Thus we see the Bashkirs are, properly speaking, no longer a purely
pastoral, nomadic people. The discovery of this fact caused me some little
disappointment, and in the hope of finding a tribe in a more primitive
condition I visited the Kirghiz of the Inner Horde, who occupy the country
to the southward, in the direction of the Caspian. Here for the first time I
saw the genuine Steppe in the full sense of the term—a country level as the
sea, with not a hillock or even a gentle undulation to break the straight line
of the horizon, and not a patch of cultivation, a tree, a bush, or even a stone,
to diversify the monotonous expanse.

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Traversing such a region is, I need scarcely say, very weary work—all
the more as there are no milestones or other landmarks to show the progress
you are making. Still, it is not so overwhelmingly wearisome as might be
supposed. In the morning you may watch the vast lakes, with their rugged
promontories and well-wooded banks, which the mirage creates for your
amusement. Then during the course of the day there are always one or two
trifling incidents which arouse you for a little from your somnolence. Now
you descry a couple of horsemen on the distant horizon, and watch them as
they approach; and when they come alongside you may have a talk with
them if you know the language or have an interpreter; or you may amuse
yourself with a little pantomime, if articulate speech is impossible. Now
you encounter a long train of camels marching along with solemn, stately
step, and speculate as to the contents of the big packages with which they
are laden. Now you encounter the carcass of a horse that has fallen by the
wayside, and watch the dogs and the steppe eagles fighting over their prey;
and if you are murderously inclined you may take a shot with your revolver
at these great birds, for they are ignorantly brave, and will sometimes allow
you to approach within twenty or thirty yards. At last you perceive—most
pleasant sight of all—a group of haystack-shaped tents in the distance; and
you hurry on to enjoy the grateful shade, and quench your thirst with "deep,
deep draughts" of refreshing kumyss.
During my journey through the Kirghiz country I was accompanied by a
Russian gentleman, who had provided himself with a circular letter from
the hereditary chieftain of the Horde, a personage who rejoiced in the
imposing name of Genghis Khan,* and claimed to be a descendant of the
great Mongol conqueror. This document assured us a good reception in the
aouls through which we passed. Every Kirghis who saw it treated it with
profound respect, and professed to put all his goods and chattels at our
service. But in spite of this powerful recommendation we met with none of
the friendly cordiality and communicativeness which I had found among
the Bashkirs. A tent with an unlimited quantity of cushions was always set
apart for our accommodation; the sheep were killed and boiled for our
dinner, and the pails of kumyss were regularly brought for our refreshment;
but all this was evidently done as a matter of duty and not as a spontaneous
expression of hospitality. When we determined once or twice to prolong our
visit beyond the term originally announced, I could perceive that our host
was not at all delighted by the change of our plans. The only consolation we

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had was that those who entertained us made no scruples about accepting
payment for the food and shelter supplied.

* I have adopted the ordinary English spelling of this name.
The Kirghiz and the Russians pronounce it "Tchinghiz."

From all this I have no intention of drawing the conclusion that the
Kirghiz are, as a people, inhospitable or unfriendly to strangers. My
experience of them is too limited to warrant any such inference. The letter
of Genghis Khan insured us all the accommodation we required, but it at
the same time gave us a certain official character not at all favourable to the
establishment of friendly relations. Those with whom we came in contact
regarded us as Russian officials, and suspected us of having some secret
designs. As I endeavoured to discover the number of their cattle, and to
form an approximate estimate of their annual revenue, they naturally feared
—having no conception of disinterested scientific curiosity—that these data
were being collected for the purpose of increasing the taxes, or with some
similar intention of a sinister kind. Very soon I perceived clearly that any
information we might here collect regarding the economic conditions of
pastoral life would not be of much value, and I postponed my proposed
studies to a more convenient season.
The Kirghiz are, ethnographically speaking, closely allied to the
Bashkirs, but differ from them both in physiognomy and language. Their
features approach much nearer the pure Mongol type, and their language is
a distinct dialect, which a Bashkir or a Tartar of Kazan has some difficulty
in understanding. They are professedly Mahometans, but their
Mahometanism is not of a rigid kind, as may be seen by the fact that their
women do not veil their faces even in the presence of Ghiaours—a laxness
of which the Ghiaour will certainly not approve if he happen to be sensitive
to female beauty and ugliness. Their mode of life differs from that of the
Bashkirs, but they have proportionately more land and are consequently still
able to lead a purely pastoral life. Near their western frontier, it is true, they
annually let patches of land to the Russian peasants for the purpose of
raising crops; but these encroachments can never advance very far, for the
greater part of their territory is unsuited to agriculture, on account of a large
admixture of salt in the soil. This fact will have an important influence on
their future. Unlike the Bashkirs, who possess good arable land, and are

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consequently on the road to become agriculturists, they will in all
probability continue to live exclusively by their flocks and herds.
To the southwest of the Lower Volga, in the flat region lying to the north
of the Caucasus, we find another pastoral tribe, the Kalmyks, differing
widely from the two former in language, in physiognomy, and in religion.
Their language, a dialect of the Mongolian, has no close affinity with any
other language in this part of the world. In respect of religion they are
likewise isolated, for they are Buddhists, and have consequently no co-
religionists nearer than Mongolia or Thibet. But it is their physiognomy that
most strikingly distinguishes them from the surrounding peoples, and
stamps them as Mongols of the purest water. There is something almost
infra-human in their ugliness. They show in an exaggerated degree all those
repulsive traits which we see toned down and refined in the face of an
average Chinaman; and it is difficult, when we meet them for the first time,
to believe that a human soul lurks behind their expressionless, flattened
faces and small, dull, obliquely set eyes. If the Tartar and Turkish races are
really descended from ancestors of that type, then we must assume that they
have received in the course of time a large admixture of Aryan or Semitic
blood.
But we must not be too hard on the poor Kalmyks, or judge of their
character by their unprepossessing appearance. They are by no means so
unhuman as they look. Men who have lived among them have assured me
that they are decidedly intelligent, especially in all matters relating to cattle,
and that they are—though somewhat addicted to cattle-lifting and other
primitive customs not tolerated in the more advanced stages of civilisation
—by no means wanting in some of the better qualities of human nature.
Formerly there was a fourth pastoral tribe in this region—the Nogai
Tartars. They occupied the plains to the north of the Sea of Azof, but they
are no longer to be found there. Shortly after the Crimean war they
emigrated to Turkey, and their lands are now occupied by Russian, German,
Bulgarian, and Montenegrin colonists.
Among the pastoral tribes of this region the Kalmyks are recent intruders.
They first appeared in the seventeenth century, and were long formidable on
account of their great numbers and compact organisation; but in 1771 the
majority of them suddenly struck their tents and retreated to their old home
in the north of the Celestial Empire. Those who remained were easily

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pacified, and have long since lost, under the influence of unbroken peace
and a strong Russian administration, their old warlike spirit. Their latest
military exploits were performed during the last years of the Napoleonic
wars, and were not of a very serious kind; a troop of them accompanied the
Russian army, and astonished Western Europe by their uncouth features,
their strange costume, and their primitive accoutrements, among which their
curious bows and arrows figured conspicuously.
The other pastoral tribes which I have mentioned—Bashkirs, Kirghiz,
and Nogai Tartars—are the last remnants of the famous marauders who
from time immemorial down to a comparatively recent period held the vast
plains of Southern Russia. The long struggle between them and the
agricultural colonists from the northwest, closely resembling the long
struggle between the Red-skins and the white settlers on the prairies of
North America, forms an important page of Russian history.
For centuries the warlike nomads stoutly resisted all encroachments on
their pasture-grounds, and considered cattle-lifting, kidnapping, and pillage
as a legitimate and honorable occupation. "Their raids," says an old
Byzantine writer, "are as flashes of lightning, and their retreat is at once
heavy and light—heavy from booty and light from the swiftness of their
movements. For them a peaceful life is a misfortune, and a convenient
opportunity for war is the height of felicity. Worst of all, they are more
numerous than bees in spring, their numbers are uncountable." "Having no
fixed place of abode," says another Byzantine authority, "they seek to
conquer all lands and colonise none. They are flying people, and therefore
cannot be caught. As they have neither towns nor villages, they must be
hunted like wild beasts, and can be fitly compared only to griffins, which
beneficent Nature has banished to uninhabited regions." As a Persian
distich, quoted by Vambery, has it—

"They came, conquered, burned,
pillaged, murdered, and went."

Their raids are thus described by an old Russian chronicler: "They burn
the villages, the farmyards, and the churches. The land is turned by them
into a desert, and the overgrown fields become the lair of wild beasts. Many
people are led away into slavery; others are tortured and killed, or die from
hunger and thirst. Sad, weary, stiff from cold, with faces wan from woe,
barefoot or naked, and torn by the thistles, the Russian prisoners trudge

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along through an unknown country, and, weeping, say to one another, 'I am
from such a town, and I from such a village.'" And in harmony with the
monastic chroniclers we hear the nameless Slavonic Ossian wailing for the
fallen sons of Rus: "In the Russian land is rarely heard the voice of the
husbandman, but often the cry of the vultures, fighting with each other over
the bodies of the slain; and the ravens scream as they fly to the spoil."
In spite of the stubborn resistance of the nomads the wave of colonisation
moved steadily onwards until the first years of the thirteenth century, when
it was suddenly checked and thrown back. A great Mongolian horde from
Eastern Asia, far more numerous and better organized than the local
nomadic tribes, overran the whole country, and for more than two centuries
Russia was in a certain sense ruled by Mongol Khans. As I wish to speak at
some length of this Mongol domination, I shall devote to it a separate
chapter.

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CHAPTER XIV
THE MONGOL DOMINATION

The Conquest—Genghis Khan and his People—Creation and Rapid
Disintegration of the Mongol Empire—The Golden Horde—The Real
Character of the Mongol Domination—Religious Toleration—Mongol
System of Government—Grand Princes—The Princes of Moscow—
Influence of the Mongol Domination—Practical Importance of the Subject.
The Tartar invasion, with its direct and indirect consequences, is a subject
which has more than a mere antiquarian interest. To the influence of the
Mongols are commonly attributed many peculiarities in the actual condition
and national character of the Russians of the present day, and some writers
would even have us believe that the men whom we call Russians are simply
Tartars half disguised by a thin varnish of European civilisation. It may be
well, therefore, to inquire what the Tartar or Mongol domination really was,
and how far it affected the historical development and national character of
the Russian people.
The story of the conquest may be briefly told. In 1224 the chieftains of
the Poloftsi—one of those pastoral tribes which roamed on the Steppe and
habitually carried on a predatory warfare with the Russians of the south—
sent deputies to Mistislaf the Brave, Prince of Galicia, to inform him that
their country had been invaded from the southeast by strong, cruel enemies
called Tartars*—strange-looking men with brown faces, eyes small and
wide apart, thick lips, broad shoulders, and black hair. "Today," said the
deputies, "they have seized our country, and tomorrow they will seize yours
if you do not help us."

* The word is properly "Tatar," and the Russians write and
pronounce it in this way, but I have preferred to retain the
better known form.

Mistislaf had probably no objection to the Poloftsi being annihilated by
some tribe stronger and fiercer than themselves, for they gave him a great
deal of trouble by their frequent raids; but he perceived the force of the

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argument about his own turn coming next, and thought it wise to assist his
usually hostile neighbours. For the purpose of warding off the danger he
called together the neighbouring Princes, and urged them to join him in an
expedition against the new enemy. The expedition was undertaken, and
ended in disaster. On the Kalka, a small river falling into the Sea of Azof,
the Russian host met the invaders, and was completely routed. The country
was thereby opened to the victors, but they did not follow up their
advantage. After advancing for some distance they suddenly wheeled round
and disappeared.
Thus ended unexpectedly the first visit of these unwelcome strangers.
Thirteen years afterwards they returned, and were not so easily got rid of.
An enormous horde crossed the River Ural and advanced into the heart of
the country, pillaging, burning, devastating, and murdering. Nowhere did
they meet with serious resistance. The Princes made no attempt to combine
against the common enemy. Nearly all the principal towns were laid in
ashes, and the inhabitants were killed or carried off as slaves. Having
conquered Russia, they advanced westward, and threw all Europe into
alarm. The panic reached even England, and interrupted, it is said, for a
time the herring fishing on the coast. Western Europe, however, escaped
their ravages. After visiting Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Servia, and
Dalmatia, they retreated to the Lower Volga, and the Russian Princes were
summoned thither to do homage to the victorious Khan.
At first the Russians had only very vague notions as to who this terrible
enemy was. The old chronicler remarks briefly: "For our sins unknown
peoples have appeared. No one knows who they are or whence they have
come, or to what race and faith they belong. They are commonly called
Tartars, but some call them Tauermen, and others Petchenegs. Who they
really are is known only to God, and perhaps to wise men deeply read in
books." Some of these "wise men deeply read in books" supposed them to
be the idolatrous Moabites who had in Old Testament times harassed God's
chosen people, whilst others thought that they must be the descendants of
the men whom Gideon had driven out, of whom a revered saint had
prophesied that they would come in the latter days and conquer the whole
earth, from the East even unto the Euphrates, and from the Tigris even unto
the Black Sea.

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We are now happily in a position to dispense with such vague
ethnographical speculations. From the accounts of several European
travellers who visited Tartary about that time, and from the writings of
various Oriental historians, we know a great deal about these barbarians
who conquered Russia and frightened the Western nations.
The vast region lying to the east of Russia, from the basin of the Volga to
the shores of the Pacific Ocean, was inhabited then, as it is still, by
numerous Tartar and Mongol tribes. These two terms are often regarded as
identical and interchangeable, but they ought, I think, to be distinguished.
From the ethnographic, the linguistic, and the religious point of view they
differ widely from each other. The Kazan Tartars, the Bashkirs, the Kirghiz,
in a word, all the tribes in the country stretching latitudinally from the Volga
to Kashgar, and longitudinally from the Persian frontier, the Hindu Kush
and the Northern Himalaya, to a line drawn east and west through the
middle of Siberia, belong to the Tartar group; whereas those further
eastward, occupying Mongolia and Manchuria, are Mongol in the stricter
sense of the term.
A very little experience enables the traveller to distinguish between the
two. Both of them have the well-known characteristics of the Northern
Asiatic—the broad flat face, yellow skin, small, obliquely set eyes, high
cheekbones, thin, straggling beard; but these traits are more strongly
marked, more exaggerated, if we may use such an expression, in the
Mongol than in the Tartar. Thus the Mongol is, according to our
conceptions, by far the uglier of the two, and the man of Tartar race, when
seen beside him, appears almost European by comparison. The distinction is
confirmed by a study of their languages. All the Tartar languages are closely
allied, so that a person of average linguistic talent who has mastered one of
them, whether it be the rude Turki of Central Asia or the highly polished
Turkish of Stambul, can easily acquire any of the others; whereas even an
extensive acquaintance with the Tartar dialects will be of no practical use to
him in learning a language of the Mongol group. In their religions likewise
the two races differ. The Mongols are as a rule Shamanists or Buddhists,
while the Tartars are Mahometans. Some of the Mongol invaders, it is true,
adopted Mahometanism from the conquered Tartar tribes, and by this
change of religion, which led naturally to intermarriage, their descendants
became gradually blended with the older population; but the broad line of
distinction was not permanently effaced.

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It is often supposed, even by people who profess to be acquainted with
Russian history, that Mongols and Tartars alike first came westward to the
frontiers of Europe with Genghis Khan. This is true of the Mongols, but so
far as the Tartars are concerned it is an entire mistake. From time
immemorial the Tartar tribes roamed over these territories. Like the
Russians, they were conquered by the Mongol invaders and had long to pay
tribute, and when the Mongol empire crumbled to pieces by internal
dissensions and finally disappeared before the victorious advance of the
Russians, the Tartars reappeared from the confusion without having lost,
notwithstanding an intermixture doubtless of Mongol blood, their old racial
characteristics, their old dialects, and their old tribal organisation.
The germ of the vast horde which swept over Asia and advanced into the
centre of Europe was a small pastoral tribe of Mongols living in the hilly
country to the north of China, near the sources of the Amur. This tribe was
neither more warlike nor more formidable than its neighbours till near the
close of the twelfth century, when there appeared in it a man who is
described as "a mighty hunter before the Lord." Of him and his people we
have a brief description by a Chinese author of the time: "A man of gigantic
stature, with broad forehead and long beard, and remarkable for his bravery.
As to his people, their faces are broad, flat, and four-cornered, with
prominent cheek-bones; their eyes have no upper eyelashes; they have very
little hair in their beards and moustaches; their exterior is very repulsive."
This man of gigantic stature was no other than Genghis Khan. He began by
subduing and incorporating into his army the surrounding tribes, conquered
with their assistance a great part of Northern China, and then, leaving one
of his generals to complete the conquest of the Celestial Empire, he led his
army westward with the ambitious design of conquering the whole world.
"As there is but one God in heaven," he was wont to say, "so there should
be but one ruler on earth"; and this one universal ruler he himself aspired to
be.
A European army necessarily diminishes in force and its existence
becomes more and more imperilled as it advances from its base of
operations into a foreign and hostile country. Not so a horde like that of
Genghis Khan in a country such as that which it had to traverse. It needed
no base of operations, for it took with it its flocks, its tents, and all its
worldly goods. Properly speaking, it was not an army at all, but rather a
people in movement. The grassy Steppes fed the flocks, and the flocks fed

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the warriors; and with such a simple commissariat system there was no
necessity for keeping up communications with the point of departure.
Instead of diminishing in numbers, the horde constantly increased as it
moved forwards. The nomadic tribes which it encountered on its way,
composed of men who found a home wherever they found pasture and
drinking-water, required little persuasion to make them join the onward
movement. By means of this terrible instrument of conquest Genghis
succeeded in creating a colossal Empire, stretching from the Carpathians to
the eastern shores of Asia, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Himalayas.
Genghis was no mere ruthless destroyer; he was at the same time one of
the greatest administrators the world has ever seen. But his administrative
genius could not work miracles. His vast Empire, founded on conquest and
composed of the most heterogeneous elements, had no principle of organic
life in it, and could not possibly be long-lived. It had been created by him,
and it perished with him. For some time after his death the dignity of Grand
Khan was held by some one of his descendants, and the centralised
administration was nominally preserved; but the local rulers rapidly
emancipated themselves from the central authority, and within half a
century after the death of its founder the great Mongol Empire was little
more than "a geographical expression."
With the dismemberment of the short-lived Empire the danger for
Eastern Europe was by no means at an end. The independent hordes were
scarcely less formidable than the Empire itself. A grandson of Genghis
formed on the Russian frontier a new State, commonly known as Kiptchak,
or the Golden Horde, and built a capital called Serai, on one of the arms of
the Lower Volga. This capital, which has since so completely disappeared
that there is some doubt as to its site, is described by Ibn Batuta, who
visited it in the fifteenth century, as a very great, populous, and beautiful
city, possessing many mosques, fine market-places, and broad streets, in
which were to be seen merchants from Babylon, Egypt, Syria, and other
countries. Here lived the Khans of the Golden Horde, who kept Russia in
subjection for two centuries.
In conquering Russia the Mongols had no wish to possess themselves of
the soil, or to take into their own hands the local administration. What they
wanted was not land, of which they had enough and to spare, but movable
property which they might enjoy without giving up their pastoral, nomadic

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life. They applied, therefore, to Russia the same method of extracting
supplies as they had used in other countries. As soon as their authority had
been formally acknowledged they sent officials into the country to number
the inhabitants and to collect an amount of tribute proportionate to the
population. This was a severe burden for the people, not only on account of
the sum demanded, but also on account of the manner in which it was
raised. The exactions and cruelty of the tax-gatherers led to local
insurrections, and the insurrections were of course always severely
punished. But there was never any general military occupation of the
country or any wholesale confiscations of land, and the existing political
organisation was left undisturbed. The modern method of dealing with
annexed provinces was totally unknown to the Mongols. The Khans never
thought of attempting to denationalise their Russian subjects. They
demanded simply an oath of allegiance from the Princes* and a certain sum
of tribute from the people. The vanquished were allowed to retain their
land, their religion, their language, their courts of justice, and all their other
institutions.

* During the Mongol domination Russia was composed of a
large number of independent principalities.

The nature of the Mongol domination is well illustrated by the policy
which the conquerors adopted towards the Russian Church. For more than
half a century after the conquest the religion of the Tartars was a mixture of
Buddhism and Paganism, with traces of Sabaeism or fire-worship. During
this period Christianity was more than simply tolerated. The Grand Khan
Kuyuk caused a Christian chapel to be erected near his domicile, and one of
his successors, Khubilai, was in the habit of publicly taking part in the
Easter festivals. In 1261 the Khan of the Golden Horde allowed the
Russians to found a bishopric in his capital, and several members of his
family adopted Christianity. One of them even founded a monastery, and
became a saint of the Russian Church! The Orthodox clergy were exempted
from the poll-tax, and in the charters granted to them it was expressly
declared that if any one committed blasphemy against the faith of the
Russians he should be put to death. Some time afterwards the Golden Horde
was converted to Islam, but the Khans did not on that account change their
policy. They continued to favour the clergy, and their protection was long
remembered. Many generations later, when the property of the Church was

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threatened by the autocratic power, refractory ecclesiastics contrasted the
policy of the Orthodox Sovereign with that of the "godless Tartars," much
to the advantage of the latter.
At first there was and could be very little mutual confidence between the
conquerors and the conquered. The Princes anxiously looked for an
opportunity of throwing off the galling yoke, and the people chafed under
the exactions and cruelty of the tribute-collectors, whilst the Khans took
precautions to prevent insurrection, and threatened to devastate the country
if their authority was not respected. But in the course of time this mutual
distrust and hostility greatly lessened. When the Princes found by
experience that all attempts at resistance were fruitless, they became
reconciled to their new position, and instead of seeking to throw off the
Khan's authority, they tried to gain his favour, in the hope of forwarding
their personal interests. For this purpose they paid frequent visits to the
Tartar Suzerain, made rich presents to his wives and courtiers, received
from him charters confirming their authority, and sometimes even married
members of his family. Some of them used the favour thus acquired for
extending their possessions at the expense of neighbouring Princes of their
own race, and did not hesitate to call in Tartar hordes to their assistance.
The Khans, in their turn, placed greater confidence in their vassals,
entrusted them with the task of collecting the tribute, recalled their own
officials who were a constant eyesore to the people, and abstained from all
interference in the internal affairs of the principalities so long as the tribute
was regularly paid. The Princes acted, in short, as the Khan's lieutenants,
and became to a certain extent Tartarised. Some of them carried this policy
so far that they were reproached by the people with "loving beyond measure
the Tartars and their language, and with giving them too freely land, and
gold, and goods of every kind."
Had the Khans of the Golden Horde been prudent, far-seeing statesmen,
they might have long retained their supremacy over Russia. In reality they
showed themselves miserably deficient in political talent. Seeking merely to
extract from the country as much tribute as possible, they overlooked all
higher considerations, and by this culpable shortsightedness prepared their
own political ruin. Instead of keeping all the Russian Princes on the same
level and thereby rendering them all equally feeble, they were constantly
bribed or cajoled into giving to one or more of their vassals a pre-eminence
over the others. At first this pre-eminence consisted in little more than the

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empty title of Grand Prince; but the vassals thus favoured soon transformed
the barren distinction into a genuine power by arrogating to themselves the
exclusive right of holding direct communications with the Horde, and
compelling the minor Princes to deliver to them the Mongol tribute. If any
of the lesser Princes refused to acknowledge this intermediate authority, the
Grand Prince could easily crush them by representing them at the Horde as
rebels. Such an accusation would cause the accused to be summoned before
the Supreme Tribunal, where the procedure was extremely summary and the
Grand Prince had always the means of obtaining a decision in his own
favour.
Of the Princes who strove in this way to increase their influence, the
most successful were the Grand Princes of Moscow. They were not a
chivalrous race, or one with which the severe moralist can sympathise, but
they were largely endowed with cunning, tact, and perseverance, and were
little hampered by conscientious scruples. Having early discovered that the
liberal distribution of money at the Tartar court was the surest means of
gaining favour, they lived parsimoniously at home and spent their savings at
the Horde. To secure the continuance of the favour thus acquired, they were
ready to form matrimonial alliances with the Khan's family, and to act
zealously as his lieutenants. When Novgorod, the haughty, turbulent
republic, refused to pay the yearly tribute, they quelled the insurrection and
punished the leaders; and when the inhabitants of Tver rose against the
Tartars and compelled their Prince to make common cause with them, the
wily Muscovite hastened to the Tartar court and received from the Khan the
revolted principality, with 50,000 Tartars to support his authority.
Thus those cunning Moscow Princes "loved the Tartars beyond measure"
so long as the Khan was irresistibly powerful, but as his power waned they
stood forth as his rivals. When the Golden Horde, like the great Empire of
which it had once formed a part, fell to pieces in the fifteenth century, these
ambitious Princes read the signs of the times, and put themselves at the
head of the liberation movement, which was at first unsuccessful, but
ultimately freed the country from the hated yoke.
From this brief sketch of the Mongol domination the reader will readily
understand that it did not leave any deep, lasting impression on the people.
The invaders never settled in Russia proper, and never amalgamated with
the native population. So long as they retained their semi-pagan, semi-

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Buddhistic religion, a certain number of their notables became Christians
and were absorbed by the Russian Noblesse; but as soon as the Horde
adopted Islam this movement was arrested. There was no blending of the
two races such as has taken place—and is still taking place—between the
Russian peasantry and the Finnish tribes of the North. The Russians
remained Christians, and the Tartars remained Mahometans; and this
difference of religion raised an impassable barrier between the two
nationalities.
It must, however, be admitted that the Tartar domination, though it had
little influence on the life and habits of the people, had a considerable
influence on the political development of the nation. At the time of the
conquest Russia was composed of a large number of independent
principalities, all governed by descendants of Rurik. As these principalities
were not geographical or ethnographical units, but mere artificial, arbitrarily
defined districts, which were regularly subdivided or combined according
to the hereditary rights of the Princes, it is highly probable that they would
in any case have been sooner or later united under one sceptre; but it is
quite certain that the policy of the Khans helped to accelerate this
unification and to create the autocratic power which has since been wielded
by the Tsars. If the principalities had been united without foreign
interference we should probably have found in the united State some form
of political organisation corresponding to that which existed in the
component parts—some mixed form of government, in which the political
power would have been more or less equally divided between the Tsar and
the people. The Tartar rule interrupted this normal development by
extinguishing all free political life. The first Tsars of Muscovy were the
political descendants, not of the old independent Princes, but of the Mongol
Khans. It may be said, therefore, that the autocratic power, which has been
during the last four centuries out of all comparison the most important
factor in Russian history, was in a certain sense created by the Mongol
domination.

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CHAPTER XV
THE COSSACKS

Lawlessness on the Steppe—Slave-markets of the Crimea—The Military
Cordon and the Free Cossacks—The Zaporovian Commonwealth
Compared with Sparta and with the Mediaeval Military Orders—The
Cossacks of the Don, of the Volga, and of the Ural—Border Warfare—The
Modern Cossacks—Land Tenure among the Cossacks of the Don—The
Transition from Pastoral to Agriculture Life—"Universal Law" of Social
Development—Communal versus Private Property—Flogging as a Means
of Land-registration.
No sooner had the Grand Princes of Moscow thrown off the Mongol
yoke and become independent Tsars of Muscovy than they began that
eastward territorial expansion which has been going on steadily ever since,
and which culminated in the occupation of Talienwan and Port Arthur. Ivan
the Terrible conquered the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan (1552-54) and
reduced to nominal subjection the Bashkir and Kirghiz tribes in the vicinity
of the Volga, but he did not thereby establish law and order on the Steppe.
The lawless tribes retained their old pastoral mode of life and predatory
habits, and harassed the Russian agricultural population of the outlying
provinces in the same way as the Red Indians in America used to harass the
white colonists of the Far West. A large section of the Horde, inhabiting the
Crimea and the Steppe to the north of the Black Sea, escaped annexation by
submitting to the Ottoman Turks and becoming tributaries of the Sultan.
The Turks were at that time a formidable power, with which the Tsars of
Muscovy were too weak to cope successfully, and the Khan of the Crimea
could always, when hard pressed by his northern neighbours, obtain
assistance from Constantinople. This potentate exercised a nominal
authority over the pastoral tribes which roamed on the Steppe between the
Crimea and the Russian frontier, but he had neither the power nor the desire
to control their aggressive tendencies. Their raids in Russian and Polish
territory ensured, among other advantages, a regular and plentiful supply of

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slaves, which formed the chief article of export from Kaffa—the modern
Theodosia—and from the other seaports of the coast.
Of this slave trade, which flourished down to 1783, when the Crimea was
finally conquered and annexed by Russia, we have a graphic account by an
eye-witness, a Lithuanian traveller of the sixteenth century. "Ships from
Asia," he says, "bring arms, clothes, and horses to the Crimean Tartars, and
start on the homeward voyage laden with slaves. It is for this kind of
merchandise alone that the Crimean markets are remarkable. Slaves may be
always had for sale as a pledge or as a present, and every one rich enough to
have a horse deals in them. If a man wishes to buy clothes, arms, or horses,
and does not happen to have at the moment any slaves, he takes on credit
the articles required, and makes a formal promise to deliver at a certain time
a certain number of people of our blood—being convinced that he can get
by that time the requisite number. And these promises are always accurately
fulfilled, as if those who made them had always a supply of our people in
their courtyards. A Jewish money-changer, sitting at the gate of Tauris and
seeing constantly the countless multitude of our countrymen led in as
captives, asked us whether there still remained any people in our land, and
whence came such a multitude of them. The stronger of these captives,
branded on the forehead and cheeks and manacled or fettered, are tortured
by severe labour all day, and are shut up in dark cells at night. They are kept
alive by small quantities of food, composed chiefly of the flesh of animals
that have died—putrid, covered with maggots, disgusting even to dogs.
Women, who are more tender, are treated in a different fashion; some of
them who can sing and play are employed to amuse the guests at festivals.
"When the slaves are led out for sale they walk to the marketplace in
single file, like storks on the wing, in whole dozens, chained together by the
neck, and are there sold by auction. The auctioneer shouts loudly that they
are 'the newest arrivals, simple, and not cunning, lately captured from the
people of the kingdom (Poland), and not from Muscovy'; for the Muscovite
race, being crafty and deceitful, does not bring a good price. This kind of
merchandise is appraised with great accuracy in the Crimea, and is bought
by foreign merchants at a high price, in order to be sold at a still higher rate
to blacker nations, such as Saracens, Persians, Indians, Arabs, Syrians, and
Assyrians. When a purchase is made the teeth are examined, to see that they
are neither few nor discoloured. At the same time the more hidden parts of
the body are carefully inspected, and if a mole, excrescence, wound, or

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other latent defect is discovered, the bargain is rescinded. But
notwithstanding these investigations the cunning slave-dealers and brokers
succeed in cheating the buyers; for when they have valuable boys and girls,
they do not at once produce them, but first fatten them, clothe them in silk,
and put powder and rouge on their cheeks, so as to sell them at a better
price. Sometimes beautiful and perfect maidens of our nation bring their
weight in gold. This takes place in all the towns of the peninsula, but
especially in Kaffa."*

* Michalonis Litvani, "De moribus Tartarorum Fragmina," X.,
Basilliae, 1615.

To protect the agricultural population of the Steppe against the raids of
these thieving, cattle-lifting, kidnapping neighbours, the Tsars of Muscovy
and the Kings of Poland built forts, constructed palisades, dug trenches, and
kept up a regular military cordon. The troops composing this cordon were
called Cossacks; but these were not the "Free Cossacks" best known to
history and romance. These latter lived beyond the frontier on the debatable
land which lay between the two hostile races, and there they formed self-
governing military communities. Each one of the rivers flowing southwards
—the Dnieper, the Don, the Volga, and the Yaik or Ural—was held by a
community of these Free Cossacks, and no one, whether Christian or Tartar,
was allowed to pass through their territory without their permission.
Officially the Free Cossacks were Russians, for they professed to be
champions of Orthodox Christianity, and—with the exception of those of
the Dnieper—loyal subjects of the Tsar; but in reality they were something
different. Though they were Russian by origin, language, and sympathy, the
habit of kidnapping Tartar women introduced among them a certain
admixture of Tartar blood. Though self-constituted champions of
Christianity and haters of Islam, they troubled themselves very little with
religion, and did not submit to the ecclesiastical authorities. As to their
religious status, it cannot be easily defined. Whilst professing allegiance
and devotion to the Tsar, they did not think it necessary to obey him, except
in so far as his orders suited their own convenience. And the Tsar, it must be
confessed, acted towards them in a similar fashion. When he found it
convenient he called them his faithful subjects; and when complaints were
made to him about their raids in Turkish territory, he declared that they
were not his subjects, but runaways and brigands, and that the Sultan might

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punish them as he saw fit. At the same time, the so-called runaways and
brigands regularly received supplies and ammunition from Moscow, as is
amply proved by recently-published documents. Down to the middle of the
seventeenth century the Cossacks of the Dnieper stood in a similar relation
to the Polish kings; but at that time they threw off their allegiance to
Poland, and became subjects of the Tsars of Muscovy.
Of these semi-independent military communities, which formed a
continuous barrier along the southern and southeastern frontier, the most
celebrated were the Zaporovians* of the Dnieper, and the Cossacks of the
Don.

* The name "Zaporovians," by which they are known in the
West, is a corruption of the Russian word Zaporozhtsi, which
means "Those who live beyond the rapids."

The Zaporovian Commonwealth has been compared sometimes to
ancient Sparta, and sometimes to the mediaeval Military Orders, but it had
in reality quite a different character. In Sparta the nobles kept in subjection
a large population of slaves, and were themselves constantly under the
severe discipline of the magistrates. These Cossacks of the Dnieper, on the
contrary, lived by fishing, hunting, and marauding, and knew nothing of
discipline, except in time of war. Amongst all the inhabitants of the Setch—
so the fortified camp was called—there reigned the most perfect equality.
The common saying, "Bear patiently, Cossack; you will one day be
Ataman!" was often realised; for every year the office-bearers laid down the
insignia of office in presence of the general assembly, and after thanking the
brotherhood for the honour they had enjoyed, retired to their former
position of common Cossack. At the election which followed this ceremony
any member could be chosen chief of his kuren, or company, and any chief
of a kuren could be chosen Ataman.
The comparison of these bold Borderers with the mediaeval Military
Orders is scarcely less forced. They call themselves, indeed, Lytsars—a
corruption of the Russian word Ritsar, which is in its turn a corruption of
the German Ritter—talked of knightly honour (lytsarskaya tchest'), and
sometimes proclaimed themselves the champions of Greek Orthodoxy
against the Roman Catholicism of the Poles and the Mahometanism of the
Tartars; but religion occupied in their minds a very secondary place. Their
great object in life was the acquisition of booty. To attain this object they

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lived in intermittent warfare with the Tartars, lifted their cattle, pillaged
their aouls, swept the Black Sea in flotillas of small boats, and occasionally
sacked important coast towns, such as Varna and Sinope. When Tartar booty
could not be easily obtained, they turned their attention to the Slavonic
populations; and when hard pressed by Christian potentates, they did not
hesitate to put themselves under the protection of the Sultan.
The Cossacks of the Don, of the Volga, and of the Ural had a somewhat
different organisation. They had no fortified camp like the Setch, but lived
in villages, and assembled as necessity demanded. As they were completely
beyond the sphere of Polish influence, they knew nothing about "knightly
honour" and similar conceptions of Western chivalry; they even adopted
many Tartar customs, and loved in time of peace to strut about in gorgeous
Tartar costumes. Besides this, they were nearly all emigrants from Great
Russia, and mostly Old Ritualists or Sectarians, whilst the Zaporovians
were Little Russians and Orthodox.
These military communities rendered valuable service to Russia. The best
means of protecting the southern frontier was to have as allies a large body
of men leading the same kind of life and capable of carrying on the same
kind of warfare as the nomadic marauders; and such a body of men were
the Free Cossacks. The sentiment of self-preservation and the desire of
booty kept them constantly on the alert. By sending out small parties in all
directions, by "procuring tongues"—that is to say, by kidnapping and
torturing straggling Tartars with a view to extracting information from them
—and by keeping spies in the enemy's territory, they were generally
apprised beforehand of any intended incursion. When danger threatened,
the ordinary precautions were redoubled. Day and night patrols kept watch
at the points where the enemy was expected, and as soon as sure signs of
his approach were discovered a pile of tarred barrels prepared for the
purpose was fired to give the alarm. Rapidly the signal was repeated at one
point of observation after another, and by this primitive system of
telegraphy in the course of a few hours the whole district was up in arms. If
the invaders were not too numerous, they were at once attacked and driven
back. If they could not be successfully resisted, they were allowed to pass;
but a troop of Cossacks was sent to pillage their aouls in their absence,
whilst another and larger force was collected, in order to intercept them
when they were returning home laden with booty. Thus many a nameless

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battle was fought on the trackless Steppe, and many brave men fell
unhonoured and unsung:
"Illacrymabiles Urgentur ignotique longa Nocte, carent quia vate sacro."
Notwithstanding these valuable services, the Cossack communities were
a constant source of diplomatic difficulties and political dangers. As they
paid very little attention to the orders of the Government, they supplied the
Sultan with any number of casi belli, and were often ready to turn their
arms against the power to which they professed allegiance. During "the
troublous times," for example, when the national existence was endangered
by civil strife and foreign invasion, they overran the country, robbing,
pillaging, and burning as they were wont to do in the Tartar aouls. At a later
period the Don Cossacks twice raised formidable insurrections—first under
Stenka Razin (1670), and secondly under Pugatchef (1773)—and during the
war between Peter the Great and Charles XII. of Sweden the Zaporovians
took the side of the Swedish king.
The Government naturally strove to put an end to this danger, and
ultimately succeeded. All the Cossacks were deprived of their
independence, but the fate of the various communities was different. Those
of the Volga were transfered to the Terek, where they had abundant
occupation in guarding the frontier against the incursions of the Eastern
Caucasian tribes. The Zaporovians held tenaciously to their "Dnieper
liberties," and resisted all interference, till they were forcibly disbanded in
the time of Catherine II. The majority of them fled to Turkey, where some
of their descendants are still to be found, and the remainder were settled on
the Kuban, where they could lead their old life by carrying on an irregular
warfare with the tribes of the Western Caucasus. Since the capture of
Shamyl and the pacification of the Caucasus, this Cossack population of the
Kuban and the Terek, extending in an unbroken line from the Sea of Azof to
the Caspian, have been able to turn their attention to peaceful pursuits, and
now raise large quantities of wheat for exportation; but they still retain their
martial bearing, and some of them regret the good old times when a brush
with the Circassians was an ordinary occurrence and the work of tilling the
soil was often diversified with a more exciting kind of occupation.
The Cossacks of the Ural and the Don have been allowed to remain in
their old homes, but they have been deprived of their independence and
self-government, and their social organisation has been completely

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changed. The boisterous popular assemblies which formerly decided all
public affairs have been abolished, and the custom of choosing the Ataman
and other office-bearers by popular election has been replaced by a system
of regular promotion, according to rules elaborated in St. Petersburg. The
officers and their families now compose a kind of hereditary aristocracy
which has succeeded in appropriating, by means of Imperial grants, a large
portion of the land which was formerly common property. As the Empire
expanded in Asia the system of protecting the parties by Cossack colonists
was extended eastwards, so now there is a belt of Cossack territory
stretching almost without interruption from the banks of the Don to the
coast of the Pacific. It is divided into eleven sections, in each of which is
settled a Cossack corps with a separate administration.
When universal military service was introduced, in 1873, the Cossacks
were brought under the new law, but in order to preserve their military
traditions and habits they were allowed to retain, with certain modifications,
their old organisation, rights, and privileges. In return for a large amount of
fertile land and exemption from direct taxation, they have to equip
themselves at their own expense, and serve for twenty years, of which three
are spent in preparatory training, twelve in the active army, and five in the
reserve. This system gives to the army a contingent of about 330,000 men—
divided into 890 squadrons and 108 infantry companies—with 236 guns.
The Cossacks in active service are to be met with in all parts of the
Empire, from the Prussian to the Chinese frontier. In the Asiatic Provinces
their services are invaluable. Capable of enduring an incredible amount of
fatigue and all manner of privations, they can live and thrive in conditions
which would soon disable regular troops. The capacity of self-adaptation,
which is characteristic of the Russian people generally, is possessed by
them in the highest degree. When placed on some distant Asiatic frontier
they can at once transform themselves into squatters—building their own
houses, raising crops of grain, and living as colonists without neglecting
their military duties.
I have sometimes heard it asserted by military men that the Cossack
organisation is an antiquated institution, and that the soldiers which it
produces, however useful they may be in Central Asia, would be of little
service in regular European warfare. Whether this view, which received
some confirmation in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, is true or false I

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cannot pretend to say, for it is a subject on which a civilian has no right to
speak; but I may remark that the Cossacks themselves are not by any means
of that opinion. They regard themselves as the most valuable troops which
the Tsar possesses, believing themselves capable of performing anything
within the bounds of human possibility, and a good deal that lies beyond
that limit. More than once Don Cossacks have assured me that if the Tsar
had allowed them to fit out a flotilla of small boats during the Crimean War
they would have captured the British fleet, as their ancestors used to capture
Turkish galleys on the Black Sea!
In old times, throughout the whole territory of the Don Cossacks,
agriculture was prohibited on pain of death. It is generally supposed that
this measure was adopted with a view to preserve the martial spirit of the
inhabitants, but it may be explained otherwise. The great majority of the
Cossacks, averse to all regular, laborious occupations, wished to live by
fishing, hunting, cattle-breeding, and marauding, but there was always
amongst them a considerable number of immigrants—runaway serfs from
the interior—who had been accustomed to live by agriculture. These latter
wished to raise crops on the fertile virgin soil, and if they had been allowed
to do so they would to some extent have spoiled the pastures. We have here,
I believe, the true reason for the above-mentioned prohibition, and this view
is strongly confirmed by analogous facts which I have observed in another
locality. In the Kirghiz territory the poorer inhabitants of the aouls near the
frontier, having few or no cattle, wish to let part of the common land to the
neighbouring Russian peasantry for agricultural purposes; but the richer
inhabitants, who possess flocks and herds, strenuously oppose this
movement, and would doubtless prohibit it under pain of death if they had
the power, because all agricultural encroachments diminish the pasture-
land.
Whatever was the real reason of the prohibition, practical necessity
proved in the long run too strong for the anti-agriculturists. As the
population augmented and the opportunities for marauding decreased, the
majority had to overcome their repugnance to husbandry; and soon large
patches of ploughed land or waving grain were to be seen in the vicinity of
the stanitsas, as the Cossack villages are termed. At first there was no
attempt to regulate this new use of the ager publicus. Each Cossack who
wished to raise a crop ploughed and sowed wherever he thought fit, and
retained as long as he chose the land thus appropriated; and when the soil

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began to show signs of exhaustion he abandoned his plot and ploughed
elsewhere. But this unregulated use of the Communal property could not
long continue. As the number of agriculturists increased, quarrels frequently
arose, and sometimes terminated in bloodshed. Still worse evils appeared
when markets were created in the vicinity, and it became possible to sell the
grain for exportation. In some stanitsas the richer families appropriated
enormous quantities of the common land by using several teams of oxen, or
by hiring peasants in the nearest villages to come and plough for them; and
instead of abandoning the land after raising two or three crops they retained
possession of it, and came to regard it as their private property. Thus the
whole of the arable land, or at least the best part of it, became actually, if
not legally, the private property of a few families, whilst the less energetic
or less fortunate inhabitants of the stanitsa had only parcels of
comparatively barren soil, or had no land whatever, and became mere
agricultural labourers.
After a time this injustice was remedied. The landless members justly
complained that they had to bear the same burdens as those who possessed
the land, and that therefore they ought to enjoy the same privileges. The old
spirit of equality was still strong amongst them, and they ultimately
succeeded in asserting their rights. In accordance with their demands the
appropriated land was confiscated by the Commune, and the system of
periodical redistributions was introduced. By this system each adult male
possesses a share of the land.
These facts tend to throw light on some of the dark questions of social
development in its early stages.
So long as a village community leads a purely pastoral life, and possesses
an abundance of land, there is no reason why the individuals or the families
of which it is composed should divide the land into private lots, and there
are very potent reasons why they should not adopt such a course. To give
the division of the land any practical significance, it would be necessary to
raise fences of some kind, and these fences, requiring for their construction
a certain amount of labour, would prove merely a useless encumbrance, for
it is much more convenient that all the sheep and cattle should graze
together. If there is a scarcity of pasture, and consequently a conflict of
interest among the families, the enjoyment of the common land will be
regulated not by raising fences, but by simply limiting the number of sheep

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and cattle which each family is entitled to put upon the pasturage, as is done
in many Russian villages at the present day. When any one desires to keep
more sheep and cattle than the maximum to which he is entitled, he pays to
the others a certain compensation. Thus, we see, in pastoral life the dividing
of the common land is unnecessary and inexpedient, and consequently
private property in land is not likely to come into existence.
With the introduction of agriculture appears a tendency to divide the land
among the families composing the community, for each family living by
husbandry requires a definite portion of the soil. If the land suitable for
agricultural purposes be plentiful, each head of a family may be allowed to
take possession of as much of it as he requires, as was formerly done in the
Cossack stanitsas; if, on the contrary, the area of arable land is small, as is
the case in some Bashkir aouls, there will probably be a regular allotment of
it among the families.
With the tendency to divide the land into definite portions arises a
conflict between the principle of communal and the principle of private
property. Those who obtain definite portions of the soil are in general likely
to keep them and transmit them to their descendants. In a country, however,
like the Steppe—and it is only of such countries that I am at present
speaking—the nature of the soil and the system of agriculture militate
against this conversion of simple possession into a right of property. A plot
of land is commonly cultivated for only three or four years in succession. It
is then abandoned for at least double that period, and the cultivators remove
to some other portion of the communal territory. After a time, it is true, they
return to the old portion, which has been in the meantime lying fallow; but
as the soil is tolerably equal in quality, the families or individuals have no
reason to desire the precise plots which they formerly possessed. Under
such circumstances the principle of private property in the land is not likely
to strike root; each family insists on possessing a certain QUANTITY rather
than a certain PLOT of land, and contents itself with a right of usufruct,
whilst the right of property remains in the hands of the Commune; and it
must not be forgotten that the difference between usufruct and property here
is of great practical importance, for so long as the Commune retains the
right of property it may re-allot the land in any way it thinks fit.
As the population increases and land becomes less plentiful, the primitive
method of agriculture above alluded to gives place to a less primitive

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method, commonly known as "the three-field system," according to which
the cultivators do not migrate periodically from one part of the communal
territory to another, but till always the same fields, and are obliged to
manure the plots which they occupy. The principle of communal property
rarely survives this change, for by long possession the families acquire a
prescriptive right to the portions which they cultivate, and those who
manure their land well naturally object to exchange it for land which has
been held by indolent, improvident neighbours. In Russia, however, this
change has not destroyed the principle of communal property. Though the
three-field system has been in use for many generations in the central
provinces, the communal principle, with its periodical re-allotment of the
land, still remains intact.
For the student of sociology the past history and actual condition of the
Don Cossacks present many other features equally interesting and
instructive. He may there see, for instance, how an aristocracy can be
created by military promotion, and how serfage may originate and become
a recognised institution without any legislative enactment. If he takes an
interest in peculiar manifestations of religious thought and feeling, he will
find a rich field of investigation in the countless religious sects; and if he is
a collector of quaint old customs, he will not lack occupation.
One curious custom, which has very recently died out, I may here
mention by way of illustration. As the Cossacks knew very little about land-
surveying, and still less about land-registration, the precise boundary
between two contiguous yurts—as the communal land of a stanitsa was
called—was often a matter of uncertainty and a fruitful source of disputes.
When the boundary was once determined, the following method of
registering it was employed. All the boys of the two stanitsas were collected
and driven in a body like sheep to the intervening frontier. The whole
population then walked along the frontier that had been agreed upon, and at
each landmark a number of boys were soundly whipped and allowed to run
home! This was done in the hope that the victims would remember, as long
as they lived, the spot where they had received their unmerited castigation.*
The device, I have been assured, was generally very effective, but it was not
always quite successful. Whether from the castigation not being sufficiently
severe, or from some other defect in the method, it sometimes happened
that disputes afterwards arose, and the whipped boys, now grown up to
manhood, gave conflicting testimony. When such a case occurred the

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following expedient was adopted. One of the oldest inhabitants was chosen
as arbiter, and made to swear on the Scriptures that he would act honestly to
the best of his knowledge; then taking an Icon in his hand, he walked along
what he believed to be the old frontier. Whether he made mistakes or not,
his decision was accepted by both parties and regarded as final. This custom
existed in some stanitsas down to the year 1850, when the boundaries were
clearly determined by Government officials.

* A custom of this kind, I am told, existed not very long
ago in England and is still spoken of as "the beating of the
bounds."

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Page 254

CHAPTER XVI
FOREIGN COLONISTS ON THE STEPPE

The Steppe—Variety of Races, Languages, and Religions—The German
Colonists—In What Sense the Russians are an Imitative People—The
Mennonites—Climate and Arboriculture—Bulgarian Colonists—Tartar-
Speaking Greeks—Jewish Agriculturists—Russification—A Circassian
Scotchman—Numerical Strength of the Foreign Element.
In European Russia the struggle between agriculture and nomadic
barbarism is now a thing of the past, and the fertile Steppe, which was for
centuries a battle-ground of the Aryan and Turanian races, has been
incorporated into the dominions of the Tsar. The nomadic tribes have been
partly driven out and partly pacified and parked in "reserves," and the
territory which they so long and so stubbornly defended is now studded
with peaceful villages and tilled by laborious agriculturists.
In traversing this region the ordinary tourist will find little to interest him.
He will see nothing which he can possibly dignify by the name of scenery,
and he may journey on for many days without having any occasion to make
an entry in his note-book. If he should happen, however, to be an
ethnologist and linguist, he may find occupation, for he will here meet with
fragments of many different races and a variety of foreign tongues.
This ethnological variety is the result of a policy inaugurated by
Catherine II. So long as the southern frontier was pushed forward slowly,
the acquired territory was regularly filled up by Russian peasants from the
central provinces who were anxious to obtain more land and more liberty
than they enjoyed in their native villages; but during "the glorious age of
Catherine" the frontier was pushed forward so rapidly that the old method
of spontaneous emigration no longer sufficed to people the annexed
territory. The Empress had recourse, therefore, to organised emigration
from foreign countries. Her diplomatic representatives in Western Europe
tried to induce artisans and peasants to emigrate to Russia, and special
agents were sent to various countries to supplement the efforts of the
diplomatists. Thousands accepted the invitation, and were for the most part

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settled on the land which had been recently the pasture-ground of the
nomadic hordes.
This policy was adopted by succeeding sovereigns, and the consequence
of it has been that Southern Russia now contains a variety of races such as
is to be found, perhaps, nowhere else in Europe. The official statistics of
New Russia alone—that is to say, the provinces of Ekaterinoslaf, Tauride,
Kherson, and Bessarabia—enumerate the following nationalities: Great
Russians, Little Russians, Poles, Servians, Montenegrins, Bulgarians,
Moldavians, Germans, English, Swedes, Swiss, French, Italians, Greeks,
Armenians, Tartars, Mordwa, Jews, and Gypsies. The religions are almost
equally numerous. The statistics speak of Greek Orthodox, Roman
Catholics, Gregorians, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Mennonites,
Separatists, Pietists, Karaim Jews, Talmudists, Mahometans, and numerous
Russian sects, such as the Molokanye and the Skoptsi or Eunuchs. America
herself could scarcely show a more motley list in her statistics of
population.
It is but fair to state that the above list, though literally correct, does not
give a true idea of the actual population. The great body of the inhabitants
are Russian and Orthodox, whilst several of the nationalities named are
represented by a small number of souls—some of them, such as the French,
being found exclusively in the towns. Still, the variety even in the rural
population is very great. Once, in the space of three days, and using only
the most primitive means of conveyance, I visited colonies of Greeks,
Germans, Servians, Bulgarians, Montenegrins, and Jews.
Of all the foreign colonists the Germans are by far the most numerous.
The object of the Government in inviting them to settle in the country was
that they should till the unoccupied land and thereby increase the national
wealth, and that they should at the same time exercise a civilising influence
on the Russian peasantry in their vicinity. In this latter respect they have
totally failed to fulfil their mission. A Russian village, situated in the midst
of German colonies, shows generally, so far as I could observe, no signs of
German influence. Each nationality lives more majorum, and holds as little
communication as possible with the other. The muzhik observes carefully—
for he is very curious—the mode of life of his more advanced neighbours,
but he never thinks of adopting it. He looks upon Germans almost as beings
of a different world—as a wonderfully cunning and ingenious people, who

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have been endowed by Providence with peculiar qualities not possessed by
ordinary Orthodox humanity. To him it seems in the nature of things that
Germans should live in large, clean, well-built houses, in the same way as it
is in the nature of things that birds should build nests; and as it has probably
never occurred to a human being to build a nest for himself and his family,
so it never occurs to a Russian peasant to build a house on the German
model. Germans are Germans, and Russians are Russians—and there is
nothing more to be said on the subject.
This stubbornly conservative spirit of the peasantry who live in the
neighbourhood of Germans seems to give the lie direct to the oft-repeated
and universally believed assertion that Russians are an imitative people
strongly disposed to adopt the manners and customs of any foreigners with
whom they may come in contact. The Russian, it is said, changes his
nationality as easily as he changes his coat, and derives great satisfaction
from wearing some nationality that does not belong to him; but here we
have an important fact which appears to prove the contrary.
The truth is that in this matter we must distinguish between the Noblesse
and the peasantry. The nobles are singularly prone to adopt foreign
manners, customs, and institutions; the peasants, on the contrary, are as a
rule decidedly conservative. It must not, however, be supposed that this
proceeds from a difference of race; the difference is to be explained by the
past history of the two classes. Like all other peoples, the Russians are
strongly conservative so long as they remain in what may be termed their
primitive moral habitat—that is to say, so long as external circumstances do
not force them out of their accustomed traditional groove. The Noblesse
were long ago violently forced out of their old groove by the reforming
Tsars, and since that time they have been so constantly driven hither and
thither by foreign influences that they have never been able to form a new
one. Thus they easily enter upon any new path which seems to them
profitable or attractive. The great mass of the people, on the contrary, too
heavy to be thus lifted out of the guiding influence of custom and tradition,
are still animated with a strongly conservative spirit.
In confirmation of this view I may mention two facts which have often
attracted my attention. The first is that the Molokanye—a primitive
Evangelical sect of which I shall speak at length in the next chapter—
succumb gradually to German influence; by becoming heretics in religion

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they free themselves from one of the strongest bonds attaching them to the
past, and soon become heretics in things secular. The second fact is that
even the Orthodox peasant, when placed by circumstances in some new
sphere of activity, readily adopts whatever seems profitable. Take, for
example, the peasants who abandon agriculture and embark in industrial
enterprises; finding themselves, as it were, in a new world, in which their
old traditional notions are totally inapplicable, they have no hesitation in
adopting foreign ideas and foreign inventions. And when once they have
chosen this new path, they are much more "go-ahead" than the Germans.
Freed alike from the trammels of hereditary conceptions and from the
prudence which experience generates, they often give a loose rein to their
impulsive character, and enter freely on the wildest speculations.
The marked contrast presented by a German colony and a Russian village
in close proximity with each other is often used to illustrate the superiority
of the Teutonic over the Slavonic race, and in order to make the contrast
more striking, the Mennonite colonies are generally taken as the
representatives of the Germans. Without entering here on the general
question, I must say that this method of argumentation is scarcely fair. The
Mennonites, who formerly lived in the neighbourhood of Danzig and
emigrated from Prussia in order to escape the military conscription, brought
with them to their new home a large store of useful technical knowledge
and a considerable amount of capital, and they received a quantity of land
very much greater than the Russian peasants possess. Besides this, they
enjoyed until very recently several valuable privileges. They were entirely
exempted from military service and almost entirely exempted from
taxation. Altogether their lines fell in very pleasant places. In material and
moral well-being they stand as far above the majority of the ordinary
German colonists as these latter do above their Russian neighbours. Even in
the richest districts of Germany their prosperity would attract attention. To
compare these rich, privileged, well-educated farmers with the poor, heavily
taxed, uneducated peasantry, and to draw from the comparison conclusions
concerning the capabilities of the two races, is a proceeding so absurd that it
requires no further comment.
To the wearied traveller who has been living for some time in Russian
villages, one of these Mennonite colonies seems an earthly paradise. In a
little hollow, perhaps by the side of a watercourse, he suddenly comes on a
long row of high-roofed houses half concealed in trees. The trees may be

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found on closer inspection to be little better than mere saplings; but after a
long journey on the bare Steppe, where there is neither tree nor bush of any
kind, the foliage, scant as it is, appears singularly inviting. The houses are
large, well arranged, and kept in such thoroughly good repair that they
always appear to be newly built. The rooms are plainly furnished, without
any pretensions to elegance, but scrupulously clean. Adjoining the house
are the stable and byre, which would not disgrace a model farm in Germany
or England. In front is a spacious courtyard, which has the appearance of
being swept several times a day, and behind there is a garden well stocked
with vegetables. Fruit trees and flowers are not very plentiful, for the
climate is not favourable to them.
The inhabitants are honest, frugal folk, somewhat sluggish of intellect
and indifferent to things lying beyond the narrow limits of their own little
world, but shrewd enough in all matters which they deem worthy of their
attention. If you arrive amongst them as a stranger you may be a little
chilled by the welcome you receive, for they are exclusive, reserved, and
distrustful, and do not much like to associate with those who do not belong
to their own sect; but if you can converse with them in their mother tongue
and talk about religious matters in an evangelical tone, you may easily
overcome their stiffness and exclusiveness. Altogether such a village cannot
be recommended for a lengthened sojourn, for the severe order and
symmetry which everywhere prevail would soon prove irksome to any one
having no Dutch blood in his veins;* but as a temporary resting-place
during a pilgrimage on the Steppe, when the pilgrim is longing for a little
cleanliness and comfort, it is very agreeable.

* The Mennonites were originally Dutchmen. Persecuted for
their religious views in the sixteenth century, a large
number of them accepted an invitation to settle in West
Prussia, where they helped to drain the great marshes
between Danzig, Elbing, and Marienburg. Here in the course
of time they forgot their native language. Their emigration
to Russia began in 1789.

The fact that these Mennonites and some other German colonies have
succeeded in rearing a few sickly trees has suggested to some fertile minds
the idea that the prevailing dryness of the climate, which is the chief
difficulty with which the agriculturist of that region has to contend, might
be to some extent counteracted by arboriculture on a large scale. This
scheme, though it has been seriously entertained by one of his Majesty's

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ministers, must seem hardly practicable to any one who knows how much
labour and money the colonists have expended in creating that agreeable
shade which they love to enjoy in their leisure hours. If climate is affected
at all by the existence or non-existence of forests—a point on which
scientific men do not seem to be entirely agreed—any palpable increase of
the rainfall can be produced only by forests of enormous extent, and it is
hardly conceivable that these could be artificially produced in Southern
Russia. It is quite possible, however, that local ameliorations may be
effected. During a visit to the province of Voronezh in 1903 I found that
comparatively small plantations diminished the effects of drought in their
immediate vicinity by retaining the moisture for a time in the soil and the
surrounding atmosphere.
After the Mennonites and other Germans, the Bulgarian colonists deserve
a passing notice. They settled in this region much more recently, on the land
that was left vacant by the exodus of the Nogai Tartars after the Crimean
War. If I may judge of their condition by a mere flying visit, I should say
that in agriculture and domestic civilisation they are not very far behind the
majority of German colonists. Their houses are indeed small—so small that
one of them might almost be put into a single room of a Mennonite's house;
but there is an air of cleanliness and comfort about them that would do
credit to a German housewife.
In spite of all this, these Bulgarians were, I could easily perceive, by no
means delighted with their new home. The cause of their discontent, so far
as I could gather from the few laconic remarks which I extracted from
them, seemed to be this: Trusting to the highly coloured descriptions
furnished by the emigration agents who had induced them to change the
rule of the Sultan for the authority of the Tsar, they came to Russia with the
expectation of finding a fertile and beautiful Promised Land. Instead of a
land flowing with milk and honey, they received a tract of bare Steppe on
which even water could be obtained only with great difficulty—with no
shade to protect them from the heat of summer and nothing to shelter them
from the keen northern blasts that often sweep over those open plains. As
no adequate arrangements had been made for their reception, they were
quartered during the first winter on the German colonists, who, being quite
innocent of any Slavophil sympathies, were probably not very hospitable to
their uninvited guests. To complete their disappointment, they found that
they could not cultivate the vine, and that their mild, fragrant tobacco,

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which is for them a necessary of life, could be obtained only at a very high
price. So disconsolate were they under this cruel disenchantment that, at the
time of my visit, they talked of returning to their old homes in Turkey.
As an example of the less prosperous colonists, I may mention the Tartar-
speaking Greeks in the neighbourhood of Mariupol, on the northern shore
of the Sea of Azof. Their ancestors lived in the Crimea, under the rule of the
Tartar Khans, and emigrated to Russia in the time of Catherine II., before
Crim Tartary was annexed to the Russian Empire. They have almost
entirely forgotten their old language, but have preserved their old faith. In
adopting the Tartar language they have adopted something of Tartar
indolence and apathy, and the natural consequence is that they are poor and
ignorant.
But of all the colonists of this region the least prosperous are the Jews.
The Chosen People are certainly a most intelligent, industrious, frugal race,
and in all matters of buying, selling, and bartering they are unrivalled
among the nations of the earth, but they have been too long accustomed to
town life to be good tillers of the soil. These Jewish colonies were founded
as an experiment to see whether the Israelite could be weaned from his
traditionary pursuits and transferred to what some economists call the
productive section of society. The experiment has failed, and the cause of
the failure is not difficult to find. One has merely to look at these men of
gaunt visage and shambling gait, with their loop-holed slippers, and black,
threadbare coats reaching down to their ankles, to understand that they are
not in their proper sphere. Their houses are in a most dilapidated condition,
and their villages remind one of the abomination of desolation spoken of by
Daniel the Prophet. A great part of their land is left uncultivated or let to
colonists of a different race. What little revenue they have is derived chiefly
from trade of a more or less clandestine nature.*

* Mr. Arnold White, who subsequently visited some of these
Jewish Colonies in connection with Baron Hirsch's
colonisation scheme, assured me that he found them in a much
more prosperous condition.

As Scandinavia was formerly called officina gentium—a workshop in
which new nations were made—so we may regard Southern Russia as a
workshop in which fragments of old nations are being melted down to form
a new, composite whole. It must be confessed, however, that the melting
process has as yet scarcely begun.

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National peculiarities are not obliterated so rapidly in Russia as in
America or in British colonies. Among the German colonists in Russia the
process of assimilation is hardly perceptible. Though their fathers and
grandfathers may have been born in the new country, they would consider it
an insult to be called Russians. They look down upon the Russian peasantry
as poor, ignorant, lazy, and dishonest, fear the officials on account of their
tyranny and extortion, preserve jealously their own language and customs,
rarely speak Russian well—sometimes not at all—and never intermarry
with those from whom they are separated by nationality and religion. The
Russian influence acts, however, more rapidly on the Slavonic colonists—
Servians, Bulgarians, Montenegrins—who profess the Greek Orthodox
faith, learn more easily the Russian language, which is closely allied to their
own, have no consciousness of belonging to a Culturvolk, and in general
possess a nature much more pliable than the Teutonic.
The Government has recently attempted to accelerate the fusing process
by retracting the privileges granted to the colonists and abolishing the
peculiar administration under which they were placed. These measures—
especially the universal military service—may eventually diminish the
extreme exclusiveness of the Germans; the youths, whilst serving in the
army, will at least learn the Russian language, and may possibly imbibe
something of the Russian spirit. But for the present this new policy has
aroused a strong feeling of hostility and greatly intensified the spirit of
exclusiveness. In the German colonies I have often overheard complaints
about Russian tyranny and uncomplimentary remarks about the Russian
national character.
The Mennonites consider themselves specially aggrieved by the so-called
reforms. They came to Russia in order to escape military service and with
the distinct understanding that they should be exempted from it, and now
they are forced to act contrary to the religious tenets of their sect. This is the
ground of complaint which they put forward in the petitions addressed to
the Government, but they have at the same time another, and perhaps more
important, objection to the proposed changes. They feel, as several of them
admitted to me, that if the barrier which separates them from the rest of the
population were in any way broken down, they could no longer preserve
that stern Puritanical discipline which at present constitutes their force.
Hence, though the Government was disposed to make important
concessions, hundreds of families sold their property and emigrated to

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America. The movement, however, did not become general. At present the
Russian Mennonites number, male and female, about 50,000, divided into
160 colonies and possessing over 800,000 acres of land.
It is quite possible that under the new system of administration the
colonists who profess in common with the Russians the Greek Orthodox
faith may be rapidly Russianised; but I am convinced that the others will
long resist assimilation. Greek orthodoxy and Protestant sectarianism are so
radically different in spirit that their respective votaries are not likely to
intermarry; and without intermarriage it is impossible that the two
nationalities should blend.
As an instance of the ethnological curiosities which the traveller may
stumble upon unawares in this curious region, I may mention a strange
acquaintance I made when travelling on the great plain which stretches
from the Sea of Azof to the Caspian. One day I accidentally noticed on my
travelling-map the name "Shotlandskaya Koldniya" (Scottish Colony) near
the celebrated baths of Piatigorsk. I was at that moment in Stavropol, a
town about eighty miles to the north, and could not gain any satisfactory
information as to what this colony was. Some well-informed people assured
me that it really was what its name implied, whilst others asserted as
confidently that it was simply a small German settlement. To decide the
matter I determined to visit the place myself, though it did not lie near my
intended route, and I accordingly found myself one morning in the village
in question. The first inhabitants whom I encountered were unmistakably
German, and they professed to know nothing about the existence of
Scotsmen in the locality either at the present or in former times. This was
disappointing, and I was about to turn away and drive off, when a young
man, who proved to be the schoolmaster, came up, and on hearing what I
desired, advised me to consult an old Circassian who lived at the end of the
village and was well acquainted with local antiquities. On proceeding to the
house indicated, I found a venerable old man, with fine, regular features of
the Circassian type, coal-black sparkling eyes, and a long grey beard that
would have done honour to a patriarch. To him I explained briefly, in
Russian, the object of my visit, and asked whether he knew of any
Scotsmen in the district.
"And why do you wish to know?" he replied, in the same language,
fixing me with his keen, sparkling eyes.

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"Because I am myself a Scotsman, and hoped to find fellow-countrymen
here."
Let the reader imagine my astonishment when, in reply to this, he
answered, in genuine broad Scotch, "Od, man, I'm a Scotsman tae! My
name is John Abercrombie. Did ye never hear tell o' John Abercrombie, the
famous Edinburgh doctor?"
I was fairly puzzled by this extraordinary declaration. Dr. Abercrombie's
name was familiar to me as that of a medical practitioner and writer on
psychology, but I knew that he was long since dead. When I had recovered
a little from my surprise, I ventured to remark to the enigmatical personage
before me that, though his tongue was certainly Scotch, his face was as
certainly Circassian.
"Weel, weel," he replied, evidently enjoying my look of mystification,
"you're no' far wrang. I'm a Circassian Scotsman!"
This extraordinary admission did not diminish my perplexity, so I begged
my new acquaintance to be a little more explicit, and he at once complied
with my request. His long story may be told in a few words:
In the first years of the present century a band of Scotch missionaries
came to Russia for the purpose of converting the Circassian tribes, and
received from the Emperor Alexander I. a large grant of land in this place,
which was then on the frontier of the Empire. Here they founded a mission,
and began the work; but they soon discovered that the surrounding
population were not idolaters, but Mussulmans, and consequently
impervious to Christianity. In this difficulty they fell on the happy idea of
buying Circassian children from their parents and bringing them up as
Christians. One of these children, purchased about the year 1806, was a
little boy called Teoona. As he had been purchased with money subscribed
by Dr. Abercrombie, he had received in baptism that gentleman's name, and
he considered himself the foster-son of his benefactor. Here was the
explanation of the mystery.
Teoona, alias Mr. Abercrombie, was a man of more than average
intelligence. Besides his native tongue, he spoke English, German, and
Russian perfectly; and he assured me that he knew several other languages
equally well. His life had been devoted to missionary work, and especially
to translating and printing the Scriptures. He had laboured first in

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Astrakhan, then for four years and a half in Persia—in the service of the
Bale mission—and afterwards for six years in Siberia.
The Scottish mission was suppressed by the Emperor Nicholas about the
year 1835, and all the missionaries except two returned home. The son of
one of these two (Galloway) was the only genuine Scotsman remaining at
the time of my visit. Of the "Circassian Scotsmen" there were several, most
of whom had married Germans. The other inhabitants were German
colonists from the province of Saratof, and German was the language
commonly spoken in the village.
After hearing so much about foreign colonists, Tartar invaders, and
Finnish aborigines, the reader may naturally desire to know the numerical
strength of this foreign element. Unfortunately we have no accurate data on
this subject, but from a careful examination of the available statistics I am
inclined to conclude that it constitutes about one-sixth of the population of
European Russia, including Poland, Finland, and the Caucasus, and nearly a
third of the population of the Empire as a whole.

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CHAPTER XVII
AMONG THE HERETICS

The Molokanye—My Method of Investigation—Alexandrof-Hai—An
Unexpected Theological Discussion—Doctrines and Ecclesiastical
Organisation of the Molokanye—Moral Supervision and Mutual Assistance
—History of the Sect—A False Prophet—Utilitarian Christianity—
Classification of the Fantastic Sects—The "Khlysti"—Policy of the
Government towards Sectarianism—Two Kinds of Heresy—Probable
Future of the Heretical Sects—Political Disaffection.
Whilst travelling on the Steppe I heard a great deal about a peculiar
religious sect called the Molokanye, and I felt interested in them because
their religious belief, whatever it was, seemed to have a beneficial influence
on their material welfare. Of the same race and placed in the same
conditions as the Orthodox peasantry around them, they were undoubtedly
better housed, better clad, more punctual in the payment of their taxes, and,
in a word, more prosperous. All my informants agreed in describing them as
quiet, decent, sober people; but regarding their religious doctrines the
evidence was vague and contradictory. Some described them as Protestants
or Lutherans, whilst others believed them to be the last remnants of a
curious heretical sect which existed in the early Christian Church.
Desirous of obtaining clear notions on the subject, I determined to
investigate the matter for myself. At first I found this to be no easy task. In
the villages through which I passed I found numerous members of the sect,
but they all showed a decided repugnance to speak about their religious
beliefs. Long accustomed to extortion and persecution at the hands of the
Administration, and suspecting me to be a secret agent of the Government,
they carefully avoided speaking on any subject beyond the state of the
weather and the prospects of the harvest, and replied to my questions on
other topics as if they had been standing before a Grand Inquisitor.
A few unsuccessful attempts convinced me that it would be impossible to
extract from them their religious beliefs by direct questioning. I adopted,
therefore, a different system of tactics. From meagre replies already

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received I had discovered that their doctrine had at least a superficial
resemblance to Presbyterianism, and from former experience I was aware
that the curiosity of intelligent Russian peasants is easily excited by
descriptions of foreign countries. On these two facts I based my plan of
campaign. When I found a Molokan, or some one whom I suspected to be
such, I talked for some time about the weather and the crops, as if I had no
ulterior object in view. Having fully discussed this matter, I led the
conversation gradually from the weather and crops in Russia to the weather
and crops in Scotland, and then passed slowly from Scotch agriculture to
the Scotch Presbyterian Church. On nearly every occasion this policy
succeeded. When the peasant heard that there was a country where the
people interpreted the Scriptures for themselves, had no bishops, and
considered the veneration of Icons as idolatry, he invariably listened with
profound attention; and when he learned further that in that wonderful
country the parishes annually sent deputies to an assembly in which all
matters pertaining to the Church were freely and publicly discussed, he
almost always gave free expression to his astonishment, and I had to answer
a whole volley of questions. "Where is that country?" "Is it to the east, or
the west?" "Is it very far away?" "If our Presbyter could only hear all that!"
This last expression was precisely what I wanted, because it gave me an
opportunity of making the acquaintance of the Presbyter, or pastor, without
seeming to desire it; and I knew that a conversation with that personage,
who is always an uneducated peasant like the others, but is generally more
intelligent and better acquainted with religious doctrine, would certainly be
of use to me. On more than one occasion I spent a great part of the night
with a Presbyter, and thereby learned much concerning the religious beliefs
and practices of the sect. After these interviews I was sure to be treated with
confidence and respect by all the Molokanye in the village, and
recommended to the brethren of the faith in the neighbouring villages
through which I intended to pass. Several of the more intelligent peasants
with whom I spoke advised me strongly to visit Alexandrof-Hai, a village
situated on the borders of the Kirghiz Steppe. "We are dark [i.e., ignorant]
people here," they were wont to say, "and do not know anything, but in
Alexandrof-Hai you will find those who know the faith, and they will
discuss with you." This prediction was fulfilled in a somewhat unexpected
way.

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When returning some weeks later from a visit to the Kirghiz of the Inner
Horde, I arrived one evening at this centre of the Molokan faith, and was
hospitably received by one of the brotherhood. In conversing casually with
my host on religious subjects I expressed to him a desire to find some one
well read in Holy Writ and well grounded in the faith, and he promised to
do what he could for me in this respect. Next morning he kept his promise
with a vengeance. Immediately after the tea-urn had been removed the door
of the room was opened and twelve peasants were ushered in! After the
customary salutations with these unexpected visitors, my host informed me
to my astonishment that his friends had come to have a talk with me about
the faith; and without further ceremony he placed before me a folio Bible in
the old Slavonic tongue, in order that I might read passages in support of
my arguments. As I was not at all prepared to open a formal theological
discussion, I felt not a little embarrassed, and I could see that my travelling
companions, two Russian friends who cared for none of these things, were
thoroughly enjoying my discomfiture. There was, however, no possibility of
drawing back. I had asked for an opportunity of having a talk with some of
the brethren, and now I had got it in a way that I certainly did not expect.
My friends withdrew—"leaving me to my fate," as they whispered to me—
and the "talk" began.
My fate was by no means so terrible as had been anticipated, but at first
the situation was a little awkward. Neither party had any clear ideas as to
what the other desired, and my visitors expected that I was to begin the
proceedings. This expectation was quite natural and justifiable, for I had
inadvertently invited them to meet me, but I could not make a speech to
them, for the best of all reasons—that I did not know what to say. If I told
them my real aims, their suspicions would probably be aroused. My usual
stratagem of the weather and the crops was wholly inapplicable. For a
moment I thought of proposing that a psalm should be sung as a means of
breaking the ice, but I felt that this would give to the meeting a solemnity
which I wished to avoid. On the whole it seemed best to begin at once a
formal discussion. I told them, therefore, that I had spoken with many of
their brethren in various villages, and that I had found what I considered
grave errors of doctrine. I could not, for instance, agree with them in their
belief that it was unlawful to eat pork. This was perhaps an abrupt way of
entering on the subject, but it furnished at least a locus standi—something
to talk about—and an animated discussion immediately ensued. My

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opponents first endeavoured to prove their thesis from the New Testament,
and when this argument broke down they had recourse to the Pentateuch.
From a particular article of the ceremonial law we passed to the broader
question as to how far the ceremonial law is still binding, and from this to
other points equally important.
If the logic of the peasants was not always unimpeachable, their
knowledge of the Scriptures left nothing to be desired. In support of their
views they quoted long passages from memory, and whenever I indicated
vaguely any text which I needed, they at once supplied it verbatim, so that
the big folio Bible served merely as an ornament. Three or four of them
seemed to know the whole of the New Testament by heart. The course of
our informal debate need not here be described; suffice it to say that, after
four hours of uninterrupted conversation, we agreed to differ on questions
of detail, and parted from each other without a trace of that ill-feeling which
religious discussion commonly engenders. Never have I met men more
honest and courteous in debate, more earnest in the search after truth, more
careless of dialectical triumphs, than these simple, uneducated muzhiks. If
at one or two points in the discussion a little undue warmth was displayed, I
must do my opponents the justice to say that they were not the offending
party.
This long discussion, as well as numerous discussions which I had had
before and since have had with Molokanye in various parts of the country,
confirmed my first impression that their doctrines have a strong
resemblance to Presbyterianism. There is, however, an important difference.
Presbyterianism has an ecclesiastical organisation and a written creed, and
its doctrines have long since become clearly defined by means of public
discussion, polemical literature, and general assemblies. The Molokanye, on
the contrary, have had no means of developing their fundamental principles
and forming their vague religious beliefs into a clearly defined logical
system. Their theology is therefore still in a half-fluid state, so that it is
impossible to predict what form it will ultimately assume. "We have not yet
thought about that," I have frequently been told when I inquired about some
abstruse doctrine; "we must talk about it at the meeting next Sunday. What
is your opinion?" Besides this, their fundamental principles allow great
latitude for individual and local differences of opinion. They hold that Holy
Writ is the only rule of faith and conduct, but that it must be taken in the
spiritual, and not in the literal, sense. As there is no terrestrial authority to

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which doubtful points can be referred, each individual is free to adopt the
interpretation which commends itself to his own judgment. This will no
doubt ultimately lead to a variety of sects, and already there is a
considerable diversity of opinion between different communities; but this
diversity has not yet been recognised, and I may say that I nowhere found
that fanatically dogmatic, quibbling spirit which is usually the soul of
sectarianism.
For their ecclesiastical organisation the Molokanye take as their model
the early Apostolic Church, as depicted in the New Testament, and
uncompromisingly reject all later authorities. In accordance with this model
they have no hierarchy and no paid clergy, but choose from among
themselves a Presbyter and two assistants—men well known among the
brethren for their exemplary life and their knowledge of the Scriptures—
whose duty it is to watch over the religious and moral welfare of the flock.
On Sundays they hold meetings in private houses—they are not allowed to
build churches—and spend two or three hours in psalm singing, prayer,
reading the Scriptures, and friendly conversation on religious subjects. If
any one has a doctrinal difficulty which he desires to have cleared up, he
states it to the congregation, and some of the others give their opinions,
with the texts on which the opinions are founded. If the question seems
clearly solved by the texts, it is decided; if not, it is left open.
As in many young sects, there exists among the Molokanye a system of
severe moral supervision. If a member has been guilty of drunkenness or
any act unbecoming a Christian, he is first admonished by the Presbyter in
private or before the congregation; and if this does not produce the desired
effect, he is excluded for a longer or shorter period from the meetings and
from all intercourse with the members. In extreme cases expulsion is
resorted to. On the other hand, if any one of the members happens to be,
from no fault of his own, in pecuniary difficulties, the others will assist him.
This system of mutual control and mutual assistance has no doubt
something to do with the fact that the Molokanye are distinguished from the
surrounding population by their sobriety, uprightness, and material
prosperity.
Of the history of the sect my friends in Alexandrof-Hai could tell me very
little, but I have obtained from other quarters some interesting information.
The founder was a peasant of the province of Tambof called Uklein, who

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lived in the reign of Catherine II., and gained his living as an itinerant tailor.
For some time he belonged to the sect of the Dukhobortsi—who are
sometimes called the Russian Quakers, and who have recently become
known in Western Europe through the efforts of Count Tolstoy on their
behalf—but he soon seceded from them, because he could not admit their
doctrine that God dwells in the human soul, and that consequently the chief
source of religious truth is internal enlightenment. To him it seemed that
religious truth was to be found only in the Scriptures. With this doctrine he
soon made many converts, and one day he unexpectedly entered the town of
Tambof, surrounded by seventy "Apostles" chanting psalms. They were all
quickly arrested and imprisoned, and when the affair was reported to St.
Petersburg the Empress Catherine ordered that they should be handed over
to the ecclesiastical authorities, and that in the event of their proving
obdurate to exhortation they should be tried by the Criminal Courts. Uklein
professed to recant, and was liberated; but he continued his teaching
secretly in the villages, and at the time of his death he was believed to have
no less than five thousand followers.
As to the actual strength of the sect it is difficult to form even a
conjecture. Certainly it has many thousand members—probably several
hundred thousand. Formerly the Government transported them from the
central provinces to the thinly populated outlying districts, where they had
less opportunity of contaminating Orthodox neighbours; and accordingly
we find them in the southeastern districts of Samara, on the north coast of
the Sea of Azof, in the Crimea, in the Caucasus, and in Siberia. There are
still, however, very many of them in the central region, especially in the
province of Tambof.
The readiness with which the Molokanye modify their opinions and
beliefs in accordance with what seems to them new light saves them
effectually from bigotry and fanaticism, but it at the same time exposes
them to evils of a different kind, from which they might be preserved by a
few stubborn prejudices. "False prophets arise among us," said an old,
sober-minded member to me on one occasion, "and lead many away from
the faith."
In 1835, for example, great excitement was produced among them by
rumours that the second advent of Christ was at hand, and that the Son of
Man, coming to judge the world, was about to appear in the New Jerusalem,

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somewhere near Mount Ararat. As Elijah and Enoch were to appear before
the opening of the Millennium, they were anxiously awaited by the faithful,
and at last Elijah appeared, in the person of a Melitopol peasant called
Belozvorof, who announced that on a given day he would ascend into
heaven. On the day appointed a great crowd collected, but he failed to keep
his promise, and was handed over to the police as an impostor by the
Molokanye themselves. Unfortunately they were not always so sensible as
on that occasion. In the very next year many of them were persuaded by a
certain Lukian Petrof to put on their best garments and start for the
Promised Land in the Caucasus, where the Millennium was about to begin.
Of these false prophets the most remarkable in recent times was a man
who called himself Ivan Grigorief, a mysterious personage who had at one
time a Turkish and at another an American passport, but who seemed in all
other respects a genuine Russian. Some years previously to my visit he
appeared at Alexandrof-Hai. Though he professed himself to be a good
Molokan and was received as such, he enounced at the weekly meetings
many new and startling ideas. At first he simply urged his hearers to live
like the early Christians, and have all things in common. This seemed sound
doctrine to the Molokanye, who profess to take the early Christians as their
model, and some of them thought of at once abolishing personal property;
but when the teacher intimated pretty plainly that this communism should
include free love, a decided opposition arose, and it was objected that the
early Church did not recommend wholesale adultery and cognate sins. This
was a formidable objection, but "the prophet" was equal to the occasion. He
reminded his friends that in accordance with their own doctrine the
Scriptures should be understood, not in the literal, but in the spiritual, sense
—that Christianity had made men free, and every true Christian ought to
use his freedom.
This account of the new doctrine was given to me by an intelligent
Molokan, who had formerly been a peasant and was now a trader, as I sat
one evening in his house in Novo-usensk, the chief town of the district in
which Alexandrof-Hai is situated. It seemed to me that the author of this
ingenious attempt to conciliate Christianity with extreme Utilitarianism
must be an educated man in disguise. This conviction I communicated to
my host, but he did not agree with me.

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"No, I think not," he replied; "in fact, I am sure he is a peasant, and I
strongly suspect he was at some time a soldier. He has not much learning,
but he has a wonderful gift of talking; never have I heard any one speak like
him. He would have talked over the whole village, had it not been for an old
man who was more than a match for him. And then he went to Orloff-Hai
and there he did talk the people over." What he really did in this latter place
I never could clearly ascertain. Report said that he founded a communistic
association, of which he was himself president and treasurer, and converted
the members to an extraordinary theory of prophetic succession, invented
apparently for his own sensual gratification. For further information my
host advised me to apply either to the prophet himself, who was at that time
confined in the gaol on a charge of using a forged passport, or to one of his
friends, a certain Mr. I——, who lived in the town. As it was a difficult
matter to gain admittance to the prisoner, and I had little time at my
disposal, I adopted the latter alternative.
Mr. I—— was himself a somewhat curious character. He had been a
student in Moscow, and in consequence of some youthful indiscretions
during the University disturbances had been exiled to this place. After
waiting in vain some years for a release, he gave up the idea of entering one
of the learned professions, married a peasant girl, rented a piece of land,
bought a pair of camels, and settled down as a small farmer.* He had a great
deal to tell about the prophet.

* Here for the first time I saw camels used for agricultural
purposes. When yoked to a small four-wheeled cart, the
"ships of the desert" seemed decidedly out of place.

Grigorief, it seemed, was really simply a Russian peasant, but he had
been from his youth upwards one of those restless people who can never
long work in harness. Where his native place was, and why he left it, he
never divulged, for reasons best known to himself. He had travelled much,
and had been an attentive observer. Whether he had ever been in America
was doubtful, but he had certainly been in Turkey, and had fraternised with
various Russian sectarians, who are to be found in considerable numbers
near the Danube. Here, probably, he acquired many of his peculiar religious
ideas, and conceived his grand scheme of founding a new religion—of
rivalling the Founder of Christianity! He aimed at nothing less than this, as
he on one occasion confessed, and he did not see why he should not be

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successful. He believed that the Founder of Christianity had been simply a
man like himself, who understood better than others the people around him
and the circumstances of the time, and he was convinced that he himself
had these qualifications. One qualification, however, for becoming a
prophet he certainly did not possess: he had no genuine religious
enthusiasm in him—nothing of the martyr spirit about him. Much of his
own preaching he did not himself believe, and he had a secret contempt for
those who naively accepted it all. Not only was he cunning, but he knew he
was cunning, and he was conscious that he was playing an assumed part.
And yet perhaps it would be unjust to say that he was merely an impostor
exclusively occupied with his own personal advantage. Though he was
naturally a man of sensual tastes, and could not resist convenient
opportunities of gratifying them, he seemed to believe that his communistic
schemes would, if realised, be beneficial not only to himself, but also to the
people. Altogether a curious mixture of the prophet, the social reformer, and
the cunning impostor!
Besides the Molokanye, there are in Russia many other heretical sects.
Some of them are simply Evangelical Protestants, like the Stundisti, who
have adopted the religious conceptions of their neighbours, the German
colonists; whilst others are composed of wild enthusiasts, who give a loose
rein to their excited imagination, and revel in what the Germans aptly term
"der hohere Blodsinn." I cannot here attempt to convey even a general idea
of these fantastic sects with their doctrinal and ceremonial absurdities, but I
may offer the following classification of them for the benefit of those who
may desire to study the subject:
1. Sects which take the Scriptures as the basis of their belief, but interpret
and complete the doctrines therein contained by means of the occasional
inspiration or internal enlightenment of their leading members.
2. Sects which reject interpretation and insist on certain passages of
Scripture being taken in the literal sense. In one of the best known of these
sects—the Skoptsi, or Eunuchs—fanaticism has led to physical mutilation.
3. Sects which pay little or no attention to Scripture, and derive their
doctrine from the supposed inspiration of their living teachers.
4. Sects which believe in the re-incarnation of Christ.
5. Sects which confound religion with nervous excitement, and are more
or less erotic in their character. The excitement necessary for prophesying is

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commonly produced by dancing, jumping, pirouetting, or self-castigation;
and the absurdities spoken at such times are regarded as the direct
expression of divine wisdom. The religious exercises resemble more or less
closely those of the "dancing dervishes" and "howling dervishes's" with
which all who have visited Constantinople are familiar. There is, however,
one important difference: the dervishes practice their religious exercises in
public, and consequently observe a certain decorum, whilst these Russian
sects assemble in secret, and give free scope to their excitement, so that
most disgusting orgies sometimes take place at their meetings.
To illustrate the general character of the sects belonging to this last
category, I may quote here a short extract from a description of the
"Khlysti" by one who was initiated into their mysteries: "Among them men
and women alike take upon themselves the calling of teachers and prophets,
and in this character they lead a strict, ascetic life, refrain from the most
ordinary and innocent pleasures, exhaust themselves by long fasting and
wild, ecstatic religious exercises, and abhor marriage. Under the excitement
caused by their supposed holiness and inspiration, they call themselves not
only teachers and prophets, but also 'Saviours,' 'Redeemers,' 'Christs,'
'Mothers of God.' Generally speaking, they call themselves simply Gods,
and pray to each other as to real Gods and living Christs or Madonnas.
When several of these teachers come together at a meeting, they dispute
with each other in a vain boasting way as to which of them possesses most
grace and power. In this rivalry they sometimes give each other lusty blows
on the ear, and he who bears the blows most patiently, turning the other
cheek to the smiter, acquires the reputation of having most holiness."
Another sect belonging to this category is the Jumpers, among whom the
erotic element is disagreeably prominent. Here is a description of their
religious meetings, which are held during summer in the forest, and during
winter in some out-house or barn: "After due preparation prayers are read
by the chief teacher, dressed in a white robe and standing in the midst of the
congregation. At first he reads in an ordinary tone of voice, and then passes
gradually into a merry chant. When he remarks that the chanting has
sufficiently acted on the hearers, he begins to jump. The hearers, singing
likewise, follow his example. Their ever-increasing excitement finds
expression in the highest possible jumps. This they continue as long as they
can—men and women alike yelling like enraged savages. When all are

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thoroughly exhausted, the leader declares that he hears the angels
singing"—and then begins a scene which cannot be here described.
It is but fair to add that we know very little of these peculiar sects, and
what we do know is furnished by avowed enemies. It is very possible,
therefore, that some of them are not nearly so absurd as they are commonly
represented, and that many of the stories told are mere calumnies.
The Government is very hostile to sectarianism, and occasionally
endeavours to suppress it. This is natural enough as regards these fantastic
sects, but it seems strange that the peaceful, industrious, honest Molokanye
and Stundisti should be put under the ban. Why is it that a Russian peasant
should be punished for holding doctrines which are openly professed, with
the sanction of the authorities, by his neighbours, the German colonists?
To understand this the reader must know that according to Russian
conceptions there are two distinct kinds of heresy, distinguished from each
other, not by the doctrines held, but by the nationality of the holder, it seems
to a Russian in the nature of things that Tartars should be Mahometans, that
Poles should be Roman Catholics, and that Germans should be Protestants;
and the mere act of becoming a Russian subject is not supposed to lay the
Tartar, the Pole, or the German under any obligation to change his faith.
These nationalities are therefore allowed the most perfect freedom in the
exercise of their respective religions, so long as they refrain from disturbing
by propagandism the divinely established order of things.
This is the received theory, and we must do the Russians the justice to
say that they habitually act up to it. If the Government has sometimes
attempted to convert alien races, the motive has always been political, and
the efforts have never awakened much sympathy among the people at large,
or even among the clergy. In like manner the missionary societies which
have sometimes been formed in imitation of the Western nations have never
received much popular support. Thus with regard to aliens this peculiar
theory has led to very extensive religious toleration. With regard to the
Russians themselves the theory has had a very different effect. If in the
nature of things the Tartar is a Mahometan, the Pole a Roman Catholic, and
the German a Protestant, it is equally in the nature of things that the Russian
should be a member of the Orthodox Church. On this point the written law
and public opinion are in perfect accord. If an Orthodox Russian becomes a
Roman Catholic or a Protestant, he is amenable to the criminal law, and is

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at the same time condemned by public opinion as an apostate and renegade
—almost as a traitor.
As to the future of these heretical sects it is impossible to speak with
confidence. The more gross and fantastic will probably disappear as
primary education spreads among the people; but the Protestant sects seem
to possess much more vitality. For the present, at least, they are rapidly
spreading. I have seen large villages where, according to the testimony of
the inhabitants, there was not a single heretic fifteen years before, and
where one-half of the population had already become Molokanye; and this
change, be it remarked, had taken place without any propagandist
organisation. The civil and ecclesiastical authorities were well aware of the
existence of the movement, but they were powerless to prevent it. The few
efforts which they made were without effect, or worse than useless. Among
the Stundisti corporal punishment was tried as an antidote—without the
concurrence, it is to be hoped, of the central authorities—and to the
Molokanye of the province of Samara a learned monk was sent in the hope
of converting them from their errors by reason and eloquence. What effect
the birch-twigs had on the religious convictions of the Stundisti I have not
been able to ascertain, but I assume that they were not very efficacious, for
according to the latest accounts the numbers of the sect are increasing. Of
the mission in the province of Samara I happen to know more, and can state
on the evidence of many peasants—some of them Orthodox—that the only
immediate effect was to stir up religious fanaticism, and to induce a certain
number of Orthodox to go over to the heretical camp.
In their public discussions the disputants could find no common ground
on which to argue, for the simple reason that their fundamental conceptions
were different. The monk spoke of the Church as the terrestrial
representative of Christ and the sole possessor of truth, whilst his opponents
knew nothing of a Church in this sense, and held simply that all men should
live in accordance with the dictates of Scripture. Once the monk consented
to argue with them on their own ground, and on that occasion he sustained a
signal defeat, for he could not produce a single passage recommending the
veneration of Icons—a practice which the Russian peasants consider an
essential part of Orthodoxy. After this he always insisted on the authority of
the early Ecumenical Councils and the Fathers of the Church—an authority
which his antagonists did not recognise. Altogether the mission was a
complete failure, and all parties regretted that it had been undertaken. "It

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was a great mistake," remarked to me confidentially an Orthodox peasant;
"a very great mistake. The Molokanye are a cunning people. The monk was
no match for them; they knew the Scriptures a great deal better than he did.
The Church should not condescend to discuss with heretics."
It is often said that these heretical sects are politically disaffected, and the
Molokanye are thought to be specially dangerous in this respect. Perhaps
there is a certain foundation for this opinion, for men are naturally disposed
to doubt the legitimacy of a power that systematically persecutes them.
With regard to the Molokanye, I believe the accusation to be a groundless
calumny. Political ideas seemed entirely foreign to their modes of thought.
During my intercourse with them I often heard them refer to the police as
"wolves which have to be fed," but I never heard them speak of the
Emperor otherwise than in terms of filial affection and veneration.

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CHAPTER XVIII
THE DISSENTERS

Dissenters not to be Confounded with Heretics—Extreme Importance
Attached to Ritual Observances—The Raskol, or Great Schism in the
Seventeenth Century—Antichrist Appears!—Policy of Peter the Great and
Catherine II.—Present Ingenious Method of Securing Religious Toleration
—Internal Development of the Raskol—Schism among the Schismatics—
The Old Ritualists—The Priestless People—Cooling of the Fanatical
Enthusiasm and Formation of New Sects—Recent Policy of the
Government towards the Sectarians—Numerical Force and Political
Significance of Sectarianism.
We must be careful not to confound those heretical sects, Protestant and
fantastical, of which I have spoken in the preceding chapter, with the more
numerous Dissenters or Schismatics, the descendants of those who seceded
from the Russian Church—or more correctly from whom the Russian
Church seceded—in the seventeenth century. So far from regarding
themselves as heretics, these latter consider themselves more orthodox than
the official Orthodox Church. They are conservatives, too, in the social as
well as the religious sense of the term. Among them are to be found the last
remnants of old Russian life, untinged by foreign influences.
The Russian Church, as I have already had occasion to remark, has
always paid inordinate attention to ceremonial observances and somewhat
neglected the doctrinal and moral elements of the faith which it professes.
This peculiarity greatly facilitated the spread of its influence among a
people accustomed to pagan rites and magical incantations, but it had the
pernicious effect of confirming in the new converts their superstitious belief
in the virtue of mere ceremonies. Thus the Russians became zealous
Christians in all matters of external observance, without knowing much
about the spiritual meaning of the rites which they practised. They looked
upon the rites and sacraments as mysterious charms which preserved them
from evil influences in the present life and secured them eternal felicity in
the life to come, and they believed that these charms would inevitably lose

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their efficacy if modified in the slightest degree. Extreme importance was
therefore attached to the ritual minutiae, and the slightest modification of
these minutiae assumed the importance of an historical event. In the year
1476, for instance, the Novgorodian Chronicler gravely relates:
"This winter some philosophers (!) began to sing, 'O Lord, have mercy,'
and others merely, 'Lord, have mercy.'" And this attaching of enormous
importance to trifles was not confined to the ignorant multitude. An
Archbishop of Novgorod declared solemnly that those who repeat the word
"Alleluia" only twice at certain points in the liturgy "sing to their own
damnation," and a celebrated Ecclesiastical Council, held in 1551, put such
matters as the position of the fingers when making the sign of the cross on
the same level as heresies—formally anathematising those who acted in
such trifles contrary to its decisions.
This conservative spirit in religious concerns had a considerable
influence on social life. As there was no clear line of demarcation between
religious observances and simple traditional customs, the most ordinary act
might receive a religious significance, and the slightest departure from a
traditional custom might be looked upon as a deadly sin. A Russian of the
olden time would have resisted the attempt to deprive him of his beard as
strenuously as a Calvinist of the present day would resist the attempt to
make him abjure the doctrine of Predestination—and both for the same
reason. As the doctrine of Predestination is for the Calvinist, so the wearing
of a beard was for the old Russian—an essential of salvation. "Where,"
asked one of the Patriarchs of Moscow, "will those who shave their chins
stand at the Last Day?—among the righteous adorned with beards, or
among the beardless heretics?" The question required no answer.
In the seventeenth century this superstitious, conservative spirit reached
its climax. The civil wars and foreign invasions, accompanied by pillage,
famine, and plagues with which that century opened, produced a wide-
spread conviction that the end of all things was at hand. The mysterious
number of the Beast was found to indicate the year 1666, and timid souls
began to discover signs of that falling away from the Faith which is spoken
of in the Apocalypse. The majority of the people did not perhaps share this
notion, but they believed that the sufferings with which they had been
visited were a Divine punishment for having forsaken the ancient customs.
And it could not be denied that considerable changes had taken place.

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Orthodox Russia was now tainted with the presence of heretics. Foreigners
who shaved their chins and smoked the accursed weed had been allowed to
settle in Moscow, and the Tsars not only held converse with them, but had
even adopted some of their "pagan" practises. Besides this, the Government
had introduced innovations and reforms, many of which were displeasing to
the people. In short, the country was polluted with "heresy"—a subtle, evil
influence lurking in everything foreign, and very dangerous to the spiritual
and temporal welfare of the Faithful—something of the nature of an
epidemic, but infinitely more dangerous; for disease kills merely the body,
whereas "heresy" kills the soul, and causes both soul and body to be cast
into hell-fire.
Had the Government introduced the innovations slowly and cautiously,
respecting as far as possible all outward forms, it might have effected much
without producing a religious panic; but, instead of acting circumspectly as
the occasion demanded, it ran full-tilt against the ancient prejudices and
superstitious fears, and drove the people into open resistance. When the art
of printing was introduced, it became necessary to choose the best texts of
the Liturgy, Psalter, and other religious books, and on examination it was
found that, through the ignorance and carelessness of copyists, numerous
errors had crept into the manuscripts in use. This discovery led to further
investigation, which showed that certain irregularities had likewise crept
into the ceremonial. The chief of the clerical errors lay in the orthography of
the word "Jesus," and the chief irregularity in the ceremonial regarded the
position of the fingers when making the sign of the cross.
To correct these errors the celebrated Nikon, who was Patriarch in the
time of Tsar Alexis, father of Peter the Great, ordered all the old liturgical
books and the old Icons to be called in, and new ones to be distributed; but
the clergy and the people resisted. Believing these "Nikonian novelties" to
be heretical, they clung to their old Icons, their old missals and their old
religious customs as the sole anchors of safety which could save the
Faithful from drifting to perdition. In vain the Patriarch assured the people
that the change was a return to the ancient forms still preserved in Greece
and Constantinople. "The Greek Church," it was replied, "is no longer free
from heresy. Orthodoxy has become many-coloured from the violence of
the Turkish Mahomet; and the Greeks, under the sons of Hagar, have fallen
away from the ancient traditions."

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An anathema, formally pronounced by an Ecclesiastical Council against
these Nonconformists, had no more effect than the admonitions of the
Patriarch. They persevered in their obstinacy, and refused to believe that the
blessed saints and holy martyrs who had used the ancient forms had not
prayed and crossed themselves aright. "Not those holy men of old, but the
present Patriarch and his counsellors must be heretics." "Woe to us! Woe to
us!" cried the monks of Solovetsk when they received the new Liturgies.
"What have you done with the Son of God? Give him back to us! You have
changed Isus [the old Russian form of Jesus] into Iisus! It is fearful not only
to commit such a sin, but even to think of it!" And the sturdy monks shut
their gates, and defied Patriarch, Council, and Tsar for seven long years, till
the monastery was taken by an armed force.
The decree of excommunication pronounced by the Ecclesiastical
Council placed the Nonconformists beyond the pale of the Church, and the
civil power undertook the task of persecuting them. Persecution had of
course merely the effect of confirming the victims in their belief that the
Church and the Tsar had become heretical. Thousands fled across the
frontier and settled in the neighbouring countries—Poland, Russia, Sweden,
Austria, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Siberia. Others concealed themselves in
the northern forests and the densely wooded region near the Polish frontier,
where they lived by agriculture or fishing, and prayed, crossed themselves
and buried their dead according to the customs of their forefathers. The
northern forests were their favourite place of refuge. Hither flocked many
of those who wished to keep themselves pure and undefiled. Here the more
learned men among the Nonconformists—well acquainted with Holy Writ,
with fragmentary translations from the Greek Fathers, and with the more
important decisions of the early Ecumenical Councils—wrote polemical
and edifying works for the confounding of heretics and the confirming of
true believers. Hence were sent out in all directions zealous missionaries, in
the guise of traders, peddlers, and labourers, to sow what they called the
living seed, and what the official Church termed "Satan's tares." When the
Government agents discovered these retreats, the inmates generally fled
from the "ravenous wolves"; but on more than one occasion a large number
of fanatical men and women, shutting themselves up, set fire to their
houses, and voluntarily perished in the flames. In Paleostrofski Monastery,
for instance, in the year 1687, no less than 2,700 fanatics gained the crown
of martyrdom in this way; and many similar instances are on record.* As in

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all periods of religious panic, the Apocalypse was carefully studied, and the
Millennial ideas rapidly spread. The signs of the time were plain: Satan was
being let loose for a little season. Men anxiously looked for the
reappearance of Antichrist—and Antichrist appeared!

* A list of well-authenticated cases is given by Nilski,
"Semeinaya zhizn v russkom Raskole," St. Petersburg, 1869;
part I., pp. 55-57. The number of these self-immolators
certainly amounted to many thousands.

The man in whom the people recognised the incarnate spirit of evil was
no other than Peter the Great.
From the Nonconformist point of view, Peter had very strong claims to
be considered Antichrist. He had none of the staid, pious demeanour of the
old Tsars, and showed no respect for many things which were venerated by
the people. He ate, drank, and habitually associated with heretics, spoke
their language, wore their costume, chose from among them his most
intimate friends, and favoured them more than his own people. Imagine the
horror and commotion which would be produced among pious Catholics if
the Pope should some day appear in the costume of the Grand Turk, and
should choose Pashas as his chief counsellors! The horror which Peter's
conduct produced among a large section of his subjects was not less great.
They could not explain it otherwise than by supposing him to be the Devil
in disguise, and they saw in all his important measures convincing proofs of
his Satanic origin. The newly invented census, or "revision," was a profane
"numbering of the people," and an attempt to enrol in the service of
Beëlzebub those whose names were written in the Lamb's Book of Life.
The new title of Imperator was explained to mean something very
diabolical. The passport bearing the Imperial arms was the seal of
Antichrist. The order to shave the beard was an attempt to disfigure "the
image of God," after which man had been created, and by which Christ
would recognise His own at the Last Day. The change in the calendar, by
which New Year's Day was transferred from September to January, was the
destruction of "the years of our Lord," and the introduction of the years of
Satan in their place. Of the ingenious arguments by which these theses were
supported, I may quote one by way of illustration. The world, it was
explained, could not have been created in January as the new calendar
seemed to indicate, because apples are not ripe at that season, and
consequently Eve could not have been tempted in the way described!*

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* I found this ingenious argument in one of the polemical
treatises of the Old Believers.

These ideas regarding Peter and his reforms were strongly confirmed by
the vigorous persecutions which took place during the earlier years of his
reign. The Nonconformists were constantly convicted of political
disaffection—especially of "insulting the Imperial Majesty"—and were
accordingly flogged, tortured, and beheaded without mercy. But when Peter
had succeeded in putting down all armed opposition, and found that the
movement was no longer dangerous for the throne, he adopted a policy
more in accordance with his personal character. Whether he had himself any
religious belief whatever may be doubted; certainly he had not a spark of
religious fanaticism in his nature. Exclusively occupied with secular
concerns, he took no interest in subtle questions of religious ceremonial,
and was profoundly indifferent as to how his subjects prayed and crossed
themselves, provided they obeyed his orders in worldly matters and paid
their taxes regularly. As soon, therefore, as political considerations admitted
of clemency, he stopped the persecutions, and at last, in 1714, issued ukazes
to the effect that all Dissenters might live unmolested, provided they
inscribed themselves in the official registers and paid a double poll-tax.
Somewhat later they were allowed to practise freely all their old rites and
customs, on condition of paying certain fines.
With the accession of Catherine II., "the friend of philosophers," the
Raskol,* as the schism had come to be called, entered on a new phase.
Penetrated with the ideas of religious toleration then in fashion in Western
Europe, Catherine abolished the disabilities to which the Raskolniks were
subjected, and invited those of them who had fled across the frontier to
return to their homes. Thousands accepted the invitation, and many who
had hitherto sought to conceal themselves from the eyes of the authorities
became rich and respected merchants. The peculiar semi-monastic religious
communities, which had up till that time existed only in the forests of the
northern and western provinces, began to appear in Moscow, and were
officially recognised by the Administration. At first they took the form of
hospitals for the sick, or asylums for the aged and infirm, but soon they
became regular monasteries, the superiors of which exercised an undefined
spiritual authority not only over the inmates, but also over the members of
the sect throughout the length and breadth of the Empire.

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* The term is derived from two Russian words—ras, asunder;
and kolot, to split. Those who belong to the Raskol are
called Raskolniki. They call themselves Staro-obriadtsi
(Old Ritualists) or Staroveri (Old Believers).

From that time down to the present the Government has followed a
wavering policy, oscillating between complete tolerance and active
persecution. It must, however, be said that the persecution has never been of
a very searching kind. In persecution, as in all other manifestations, the
Russian Church directs its attention chiefly to external forms. It does not
seek to ferret out heresy in a man's opinions, but complacently accepts as
Orthodox all who annually appear at confession and communion, and who
refrain from acts of open hostility. Those who can make these concessions
to convenience are practically free from molestation, and those who cannot
so trifle with their conscience have an equally convenient method of
escaping persecution. The parish clergy, with their customary indifference
to things spiritual and their traditional habit of regarding their functions
from the financial point of view, are hostile to sectarianism chiefly because
it diminishes their revenues by diminishing the number of parishioners
requiring their ministrations. This cause of hostility can easily be removed
by a certain pecuniary sacrifice on the part of the sectarians, and
accordingly there generally exists between them and their parish priest a
tacit contract, by which both parties are perfectly satisfied. The priest
receives his income as if all his parishioners belonged to the State Church,
and the parishioners are left in peace to believe and practise what they
please. By this rude, convenient method a very large amount of toleration is
effectually secured. Whether the practise has a beneficial moral influence
on the parish clergy is, of course, an entirely different question.
When the priest has been satisfied, there still remains the police, which
likewise levies an irregular tax on heterodoxy; but the negotiations are
generally not difficult, for it is in the interest of both parties that they should
come to terms and live in good-fellowship. Thus practically the Raskolniki
live in the same condition as in the time of Peter: they pay a tax and are not
molested—only the money paid does not now find its way into the Imperial
Exchequer.
These external changes in the history of the Raskol have exercised a
powerful influence on its internal development.

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When formally anathematised and excluded from the dominant Church
the Nonconformists had neither a definite organisation nor a positive creed.
The only tie that bound them together was hostility to the "Nikonian
novelties," and all they desired was to preserve intact the beliefs and
customs of their forefathers. At first they never thought of creating any
permanent organisation. The more moderate believed that the Tsar would
soon re-establish Orthodoxy, and the more fanatical imagined that the end
of all things was at hand.* In either case they had only to suffer for a little
season, keeping themselves free from the taint of heresy and from all
contact with the kingdom of Antichrist.

* Some had coffins made, and lay down in them at night, in
the expectation that the Second Advent might take place
before the morning.

But years passed, and neither of these expectations was fulfilled. The
fanatics awaited in vain the sound of the last trump and the appearance of
Christ, coming with His angels to judge the world. The sun continued to
rise, and the seasons followed each other in their accustomed course, but
the end was not yet. Nor did the civil power return to the old faith. Nikon
fell a victim to Court intrigues and his own overweening pride, and was
formally deposed. Tsar Alexis in the fulness of time was gathered unto his
fathers. But there was no sign of a re-establishment of the old Orthodoxy.
Gradually the leading Raskolniki perceived that they must make
preparations, not for the Day of Judgment, but for a terrestrial future—that
they must create some permanent form of ecclesiastical organisation. In this
work they encountered at the very outset not only practical, but also
theoretical difficulties.
So long as they confined themselves simply to resisting the official
innovations, they seemed to be unanimous; but when they were forced to
abandon this negative policy and to determine theoretically their new
position, radical differences of opinion became apparent. All were
convinced that the official Russian Church had become heretical, and that it
had now Antichrist instead of Christ as its head; but it was not easy to
determine what should be done by those who refused to bow the knee to the
Son of Destruction. According to Protestant conceptions there was a very
simple solution of the difficulty: the Nonconformists had simply to create a
new Church for themselves, and worship God in the way that seemed good

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to them. But to the Russians of that time such notions were still more
repulsive than the innovations of Nikon. These men were Orthodox to the
backbone—"plus royalistes que le roi"—and according to Orthodox
conceptions the founding of a new Church is an absurdity. They believed
that if the chain of historic continuity were once broken, the Church must
necessarily cease to exist, in the same way as an ancient family becomes
extinct when its sole representative dies without issue. If, therefore, the
Church had already ceased to exist, there was no longer any means of
communication between Christ and His people, the sacraments were no
longer efficacious, and mankind was forever deprived of the ordinary
means of grace.
Now, on this important point there was a difference of opinion among the
Dissenters. Some of them believed that, though the ecclesiastical authorities
had become heretical, the Church still existed in the communion of those
who had refused to accept the innovations. Others declared boldly that the
Orthodox Church had ceased to exist, that the ancient means of grace had
been withdrawn, and that those who had remained faithful must thenceforth
seek salvation, not in the sacraments, but in prayer and such other religious
exercises as did not require the co-operation of duly consecrated priests.
Thus took place a schism among the Schismatics. The one party retained all
the sacraments and ceremonial observances in the older form; the other
refrained from the sacraments and from many of the ordinary rites, on the
ground that there was no longer a real priesthood, and that consequently the
sacraments could not be efficacious. The former party are termed Staro-
obriadsti, or Old Ritualists; the latter are called Bezpopoftsi—that is to say,
people "without priests" (bez popov).
The succeeding history of these two sections of the Nonconformists has
been widely different. The Old Ritualists, being simply ecclesiastical
Conservatives desirous of resisting all innovations, have remained a
compact body little troubled by differences of opinion. The Priestless
People, on the contrary, ever seeking to discover some new effectual means
of salvation, have fallen into an endless number of independent sects.
The Old Ritualists had still, however, one important theoretical difficulty.
At first they had amongst themselves plenty of consecrated priests for the
celebration of the ordinances, but they had no means of renewing the
supply. They had no bishops, and according to Orthodox belief the lower

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degrees of the clergy cannot be created without episcopal consecration. At
the time of the schism one bishop had thrown in his lot with the
Schismatics, but he had died shortly afterwards without leaving a successor,
and thereafter no bishop had joined their ranks. As time wore on, the
necessity of episcopal consecration came to be more and more felt, and it is
not a little interesting to observe how these rigorists, who held to the letter
of the law and declared themselves ready to die for a jot or a tittle, modified
their theory in accordance with the changing exigencies of their position.
When the priests who had kept themselves "pure and undefiled"—free from
all contact with Antichrist—became scarce, it was discovered that certain
priests of the dominant Church might be accepted if they formally abjured
the Nikonian novelties. At first, however, only those who had been
consecrated previous to the supposed apostasy of the Church were accepted,
for the very good reason that consecration by bishops who had become
heretical could not be efficacious. When these could no longer be obtained
it was discovered that those who had been baptised previous to the apostasy
might be accepted; and when even these could no longer be found, a still
further concession was made to necessity, and all consecrated priests were
received on condition of their solemnly abjuring their errors. Of such priests
there was always an abundant supply. If a regular priest could not find a
parish, or if he was deposed by the authorities for some crime or
misdemeanour, he had merely to pass over to the Old Ritualists, and was
sure to find among them a hearty welcome and a tolerable salary.
By these concessions the indefinite prolongation of Old Ritualism was
secured, but many of the Old Ritualists could not but feel that their position
was, to say the least, extremely anomalous. They had no bishops of their
own, and their priests were all consecrated by bishops whom they believed
to be heretical! For many years they hoped to escape from this dilemma by
discovering "Orthodox"—that is to say, Old Ritualist—bishops somewhere
in the East; but when the East had been searched in vain, and all their
efforts to obtain native bishops proved fruitless, they conceived the design
of creating a bishopric somewhere beyond the frontier, among the Old
Ritualists who had in times of persecution fled to Prussia, Austria, and
Turkey. There were, however, immense difficulties in the way. In the first
place it was necessary to obtain the formal permission of some foreign
Government; and in the second place an Orthodox bishop must be found,
willing to consecrate an Old Ritualist or to become an Old Ritualist himself.

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Again and again the attempt was made, and failed; but at last, after years of
effort and intrigue, the design was realised. In 1844 the Austrian
Government gave permission to found a bishopric at Belaya Krinitsa, in
Galicia, a few miles from the Russian frontier; and two years later the
deposed Metropolitan of Bosnia consented, after much hesitation, to pass
over to the Old Ritualist confession and accept the diocese.* From that time
the Old Ritualists have had their own bishops, and have not been obliged to
accept the runaway priests of the official Church.

* An interesting account of these negotiations, and a most
curious picture of the Orthodox ecclesiastical world in
Constantinople, is given by Subbotiny, "Istoria
Belokrinitskoi Ierarkhii," Moscow, 1874.

The Old Ritualists were naturally much grieved by the schism, and were
often sorely tried by persecution, but they have always enjoyed a certain
spiritual tranquillity, proceeding from the conviction that they have
preserved for themselves the means of salvation. The position of the more
extreme section of the Schismatics was much more tragical. They believed
that the sacraments had irretrievably lost their efficacy, that the ordinary
means of salvation were forever withdrawn, that the powers of darkness had
been let loose for a little season, that the authorities were the agents of
Satan, and that the personage who filled the place of the old God-fearing
Tsars was no other than Antichrist. Under the influence of these horrible
ideas they fled to the woods and the caves to escape from the rage of the
Beast, and to await the second coming of Our Lord.
This state of things could not continue permanently. Extreme religious
fanaticism, like all other abnormal states, cannot long exist in a mass of
human beings without some constant exciting cause. The vulgar necessities
of everyday life, especially among people who have to live by the labour of
their hands, have a wonderfully sobering influence on the excited brain, and
must always, sooner or later, prove fatal to inordinate excitement. A few
peculiarly constituted individuals may show themselves capable of a
lifelong enthusiasm, but the multitude is ever spasmodic in its fervour, and
begins to slide back to its former apathy as soon as the exciting cause
ceases to act.
All this we find exemplified in the history of the Priestless People. When
it was found that the world did not come to an end, and that the rigorous
system of persecution was relaxed, the less excitable natures returned to

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their homes, and resumed their old mode of life; and when Peter the Great
made his politic concessions, many who had declared him to be Antichrist
came to suspect that he was really not so black as he was painted. This idea
struck deep root in a religious community near Lake Onega (Vuigovski
Skit) which had received special privileges on condition of supplying
labourers for the neighbouring mines; and here was developed a new theory
which opened up a way of reconciliation with the Government. By a more
attentive study of Holy Writ and ancient books it was discovered that the
reign of Antichrist would consist of two periods. In the former, the Son of
Destruction would reign merely in the spiritual sense, and the Faithful
would not be much molested; in the latter, he would reign visibly in the
flesh, and true believers would be subjected to the most frightful
persecution. The second period, it was held, had evidently not yet arrived,
for the Faithful now enjoyed "a time of freedom, and not of compulsion or
oppression." Whether this theory is strictly in accordance with Apocalyptic
prophecy and patristic theology may be doubted, but it fully satisfied those
who had already arrived at the conclusion by a different road, and who
sought merely a means of justifying their position. Certain it is that very
many accepted it, and determined to render unto Caesar the things that were
Caesar's, or, in secular language, to pray for the Tsar and to pay their taxes.
This ingenious compromise was not accepted by all the Priestless People.
On the contrary, many of them regarded it as a woeful backsliding—a new
device of the Evil One; and among these irreconcilables was a certain
peasant called Theodosi, a man of little education, but of remarkable
intellectual power and unusual strength of character. He raised anew the old
fanaticism by his preaching and writings—widely circulated in manuscript
—and succeeded in founding a new sect in the forest region near the Polish
frontier.
The Priestless Nonconformists thus fell into two sections; the one, called
Pomortsi,* accepted at least a partial reconciliation with the civil power; the
other, called Theodosians, after their founder, held to the old opinions, and
refused to regard the Tsar otherwise than as Antichrist.

*The word Pomortsi means "those who live near the seashore."
It is commonly applied to the inhabitants of the Northern
provinces—that is, those who live near the shore of the
White Sea, the only maritime frontier that Russia possessed
previous to the conquests of Peter the Great.

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These latter were at first very wild in their fanaticism, but ere long they
gave way to the influences which had softened the fanaticism of the
Pomortsi. Under the liberal, conciliatory rule of Catherine they lived in
contentment, and many of them enriched themselves by trade. Their
fanatical zeal and exclusiveness evaporated under the influence of material
well-being and constant contact with the outer world, especially after they
were allowed to build a monastery in Moscow. The Superior of this
monastery, a man of much shrewdness and enormous wealth, succeeded in
gaining the favour not only of the lower officials, who could be easily
bought, but even of high-placed dignitaries, and for many years he
exercised a very real, if undefined, authority over all sections of the
Priestless People. "His fame," it is said, "sounded throughout Moscow, and
the echoes were heard in Petropol (St. Petersburg), Riga, Astrakhan, Nizhni-
Novgorod, and other lands of piety"; and when deputies came to consult
him, they prostrated themselves in his presence, as before the great ones of
the earth. Living thus not only in peace and plenty, but even in honour and
luxury, "the proud Patriarch of the Theodosian Church" could not
consistently fulminate against "the ravenous wolves" with whom he was on
friendly terms, or excite the fanaticism of his followers by highly coloured
descriptions of "the awful sufferings and persecution of God's people in
these latter days," as the founder of the sect had been wont to do. Though he
could not openly abandon any fundamental doctrines, he allowed the ideas
about the reign of Antichrist to fall into the background, and taught by
example, if not by precept, that the Faithful might, by prudent concessions,
live very comfortably in this present evil world. This seed fell upon soil
already prepared for its reception. The Faithful gradually forgot their old
savage fanaticism, and they have since contrived, while holding many of
their old ideas in theory, to accommodate themselves in practice to the
existing order of things.
The gradual softening and toning down of the original fanaticism in these
two sects are strikingly exemplified in their ideas of marriage. According to
Orthodox doctrine, marriage is a sacrament which can only be performed
by a consecrated priest, and consequently for the Priestless People the
celebration of marriage was an impossibility. In the first ages of
sectarianism a state of celibacy was quite in accordance with their
surroundings. Living in constant fear of their persecutors, and wandering
from one place of refuge to another, the sufferers for the Faith had little

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time or inclination to think of family ties, and readily listened to the monks,
who exhorted them to mortify the lusts of the flesh.
The result, however, proved that celibacy in the creed by no means
ensures chastity in practice. Not only in the villages of the Dissenters, but
even in those religious communities which professed a more ascetic mode
of life, a numerous class of "orphans" began to appear, who knew not who
their parents were; and this ignorance of blood-relationship naturally led to
incestuous connections. Besides this, the doctrine of celibacy had grave
practical inconveniences, for the peasant requires a housewife to attend to
domestic concerns and to help him in his agricultural occupations. Thus the
necessity of re-establishing family life came to be felt, and the feeling soon
found expression in a doctrinal form both among the Pomortsi and among
the Theodsians. Learned dissertations were written and disseminated in
manuscript copies, violent discussions took place, and at last a great
Council was held in Moscow to discuss the question.* The point at issue
was never unanimously decided, but many accepted the ingenious
arguments in favour of matrimony, and contracted marriages which were, of
course, null and void in the eye of the law and of the Church, but valid in all
other respects.

* I cannot here enter into the details of this remarkable
controversy, but I may say that in studying it I have been
frequently astonished by the dialectical power and logical
subtlety displayed by the disputants, some of them simple
peasants.

This new backsliding of the unstable multitude produced a new outburst
of fanaticism among the stubborn few. Some of those who had hitherto
sought to conceal the origin of the "orphan" class above referred to now
boldly asserted that the existence of this class was a religious necessity,
because in order to be saved men must repent, and in order to repent men
must sin! At the same time the old ideas about Antichrist were revived and
preached with fervour by a peasant called Philip, who founded a new sect
called the Philipists. This sect still exists. They hold fast to the old belief
that the Tsar is Antichrist, and that the civil and ecclesiastical authorities are
the servants of Satan—an idea that was kept alive by the corruption and
extortion for which the Administration was notorious. They do not venture
on open resistance to the authorities, but the bolder members take little
pains to conceal their opinions and sentiments, and may be easily

Page 292

recognised by their severe aspect, their Puritanical manner, and their
Pharisaical horror of everything which they suppose heretical and unclean.
Some of them, it is said, carry this fastidiousness to such an extent that they
throw away the handle of a door if it has been touched by a heretic!
It may seem that we have here reached the extreme limits of fanaticism,
but in reality there were men whom even the Pharisaical Puritanism of the
Philipists did not satisfy. These new zealots, who appeared in the time of
Catherine II., but first became known to the official world in the reign of
Nicholas I., rebuked the lukewarmness of their brethren, and founded a new
sect in order to preserve intact the asceticism practised immediately after
the schism. This sect still exists. They call themselves "Christ's people"
(Christoviye Lyudi), but are better known under the popular name of
"Wanderers" (Stranniki), or "Fugitives" (Beguny). Of all the sects they are
the most hostile to the existing political and social organisation. Not content
with condemning the military conscription, the payment of taxes, the
acceptance of passports, and everything connected with the civil and
ecclesiastical authorities, they consider it sinful to live peaceably among an
orthodox—that is, according to their belief, a heretical—population, and to
have dealings with any who do not share their extreme views. Holding the
Antichrist doctrine in the extreme form, they declare that Tsars are the
vessels of Satan, that the Established Church is the dwelling-place of the
Father of Lies, and that all who submit to the authorities are children of the
Devil. According to this creed, those who wish to escape from the wrath to
come must have neither houses nor fixed places of abode, must sever all
ties that bind them to the world, and must wander about continually from
place to place. True Christians are but strangers and pilgrims in the present
life, and whoso binds himself to the world will perish with the world.
Such is the theory of these Wanderers, but among them, as among the
less fanatical sects, practical necessities have produced concessions and
compromises. As it is impossible to lead a nomadic life in Russian forests,
the Wanderers have been compelled to admit into their ranks what may be
called lay-brethren—men who nominally belong to the sect, but who live
like ordinary mortals and have some rational way of gaining a livelihood.
These latter live in the villages or towns, support themselves by agriculture
or trade, accept passports from the authorities, pay their taxes regularly, and
conduct themselves in all outward respects like loyal subjects. Their chief
religious duty consists in giving food and shelter to their more zealous

Page 293

brethren, who have adopted a vagabond life in practise as well as in theory.
It is only when they feel death approaching that they consider it necessary
to separate themselves from the heretical world, and they effect this by
having themselves carried out to some neighbouring wood—or into a
garden if there is no wood at hand—where they may die in the open air.
Thus, we see, there is among the Russian Nonconformist sects what may
be called a gradation of fanaticism, in which is reflected the history of the
Great Schism. In the Wanderers we have the representatives of those who
adopted and preserved the Antichrist doctrine in its extreme form—the
successors of those who fled to the forests to escape from the rage of the
Beast and to await the second coming of Christ. In the Philipists we have
the representatives of those who adopted these ideas in a somewhat softer
form, and who came to recognise the necessity of having some regular
means of subsistence until the last trump should be heard. The Theodosians
represent those who were in theory at one with the preceding category, but
who, having less religious fanaticism, considered it necessary to yield to
force and make peace with the Government without sacrificing their
convictions. In the Pomortsi we see those who preserved only the religious
ideas of the schism, and became reconciled with the civil power. Lastly we
have the Old Ritualists, who differed from all the other sects in retaining the
old ordinances, and who simply rejected the spiritual authority of the
dominant Church. Besides these chief sections of the Nonconformists there
are a great many minor denominations (tolki), differing from each other on
minor points of doctrine. In certain districts, it is said, nearly every village
has one or two independent sects. This is especially the case among the Don
Cossacks and the Cossacks of the Ural, who are in part descendants of the
men who fled from the early persecutions.
Of all the sects the Old Ritualists stand nearest to the official Church.
They hold the same dogmas, practise the same rites, and differ only in
trifling ceremonial matters, which few people consider essential. In the
hope of inducing them to return to the official fold the Government created
at the beginning of last century special churches, in which they were
allowed to retain their ceremonial peculiarities on condition of accepting
regularly consecrated priests and submitting to ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
As yet the design has not met with much success. The great majority of the
Old Ritualists regard it as a trap, and assert that the Church in making this
concession has been guilty of self-contradiction. "The Ecclesiastical

Page 294

Council of Moscow," they say, "anathematised our forefathers for holding
to the old ritual, and declared that the whole course of nature would be
changed sooner than the curse be withdrawn. The course of nature has not
been changed, but the anathema has been cancelled." This argument ought
to have a certain weight with those who believe in the infallibility of
Ecclesiastical Councils.
Towards the Priestless People the Government has always acted in a
much less conciliatory spirit. Its severity has been sometimes justified on
the ground that sectarianism has had a political as well as a religious
significance. A State like Russia cannot overlook the existence of sects
which preach the duty of systematic resistance to the civil and ecclesiastical
authorities and hold doctrines which lead to the grossest immorality. This
argument, it must be admitted, is not without a certain force, but it seems to
me that the policy adopted tended to increase rather than diminish the evils
which it sought to cure. Instead of dispelling the absurd idea that the Tsar
was Antichrist by a system of strict and evenhanded justice, punishing
merely actual crimes and delinquencies, the Government confirmed the
notion in the minds of thousands by persecuting those who had committed
no crime and who desired merely to worship God according to their
conscience. Above all it erred in opposing and punishing those marriages
which, though legally irregular, were the best possible means of
diminishing fanaticism, by leading back the fanatics to healthy social life.
Fortunately these errors have now been abandoned. A policy of greater
clemency and conciliation has been adopted, and has proved much more
efficacious than persecution. The Dissenters have not returned to the official
fold, but they have lost much of their old fanaticism and exclusiveness.
In respect of numbers the sectarians compose a very formidable body. Of
Old Ritualists and Priestless People there are, it is said, no less than eleven
millions; and the Protestant and fantastical sects comprise probably about
five millions more. If these numbers be correct, the sectarians constitute
about an eighth of the whole population of the Empire. They count in their
ranks none of the nobles—none of the so-called enlightened class—but they
include in their number a respectable proportion of the peasants, a third of
the rich merchant class, the majority of the Don Cossacks, and nearly all the
Cossacks of the Ural.

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Under these circumstances it is important to know how far the sectarians
are politically disaffected. Some people imagine that in the event of an
insurrection or a foreign invasion they might rise against the Government,
whilst others believe that this supposed danger is purely imaginary. For my
own part I agree with the latter opinion, which is strongly supported by the
history of many important events, such as the French invasion in 1812, the
Crimean War, and the last Polish insurrection. The great majority of the
Schismatics and heretics are, I believe, loyal subjects of the Tsar. The more
violent sects, which are alone capable of active hostility against the
authorities, are weak in numbers, and regard all outsiders with such
profound mistrust that they are wholly impervious to inflammatory
influences from without. Even if all the sects were capable of active
hostility, they would not be nearly so formidable as their numbers seem to
indicate, for they are hostile to each other, and are wholly incapable of
combining for a common purpose.
Though sectarianism is thus by no means a serious political danger, it has
nevertheless a considerable political significance. It proves satisfactorily
that the Russian people is by no means so docile and pliable as is
commonly supposed, and that it is capable of showing a stubborn, passive
resistance to authority when it believes great interests to be at stake. The
dogged energy which it has displayed in asserting for centuries its religious
liberty may perhaps some day be employed in the arena of secular politics.

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CHAPTER XIX
CHURCH AND STATE

The Russian Orthodox Church—Russia Outside of the Mediaeval Papal
Commonwealth—Influence of the Greek Church—Ecclesiastical History of
Russia—Relations between Church and State—Eastern Orthodoxy and the
Russian National Church—The Synod—Ecclesiastical Grumbling—Local
Ecclesiastical Administration—The Black Clergy and the Monasteries—
The Character of the Eastern Church Reflected in the History of Religious
Art—Practical Consequences—The Union Scheme.
From the curious world of heretics and Dissenters let us pass now to the
Russian Orthodox Church, to which the great majority of the Russian
people belong. It has played an important part in the national history, and
has exercised a powerful influence in the formation of the national
character.
Russians are in the habit of patriotically and proudly congratulating
themselves on the fact that their forefathers always resisted successfully the
aggressive tendencies of the Papacy, but it may be doubted whether, from a
worldly point of view, the freedom from Papal authority has been an
unmixed blessing for the country. If the Popes failed to realise their grand
design of creating a vast European empire based on theocratic principles,
they succeeded at least in inspiring with a feeling of brotherhood and a
vague consciousness of common interest all the nations which
acknowledged their spiritual supremacy. These nations, whilst remaining
politically independent and frequently coming into hostile contact with each
other, all looked to Rome as the capital of the Christian world, and to the
Pope as the highest terrestrial authority. Though the Church did not
annihilate nationality, it made a wide breach in the political barriers, and
formed a channel for international communication by which the social and
intellectual progress of each nation became known to all the other members
of the great Christian confederacy. Throughout the length and breadth of the
Papal Commonwealth educated men had a common language, a common
literature, a common scientific method, and to a certain extent a common

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jurisprudence. Western Christendom was thus all through the Middle Ages
not merely an abstract conception or a geographical expression: if not a
political, it was at least a religious and intellectual unit, and all the countries
of which it was composed benefited more or less by the connection.
For centuries Russia stood outside of this religious and intellectual
confederation, for her Church connected her not with Rome, but with
Constantinople, and Papal Europe looked upon her as belonging to the
barbarous East. When the Mongol hosts swept over her plains, burnt her
towns and villages, and finally incorporated her into the great empire of
Genghis khan, the so-called Christian world took no interest in the struggle
except in so far as its own safety was threatened. And as time wore on, the
barriers which separated the two great sections of Christendom became
more and more formidable. The aggressive pretensions and ambitious
schemes of the Vatican produced in the Greek Orthodox world a profound
antipathy to the Roman Catholic Church and to Western influence of every
kind. So strong was this aversion that when the nations of the West
awakened in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from their intellectual
lethargy and began to move forward on the path of intellectual and material
progress, Russia not only remained unmoved, but looked on the new
civilisation with suspicion and fear as a thing heretical and accursed. We
have here one of the chief reasons why Russia, at the present day, is in
many respects less civilised than the nations of Western Europe.
But it is not merely in this negative way that the acceptance of
Christianity from Constantinople has affected the fate of Russia. The Greek
Church, whilst excluding Roman Catholic civilisation, exerted at the same
time a powerful positive influence on the historical development of the
nation.
The Church of the West inherited from old Rome something of that
logical, juridical, administrative spirit which had created the Roman law,
and something of that ambition and dogged, energetic perseverance that had
formed nearly the whole known world into a great centralised empire. The
Bishops of Rome early conceived the design of reconstructing that old
empire on a new basis, and long strove to create a universal Christian
theocratic State, in which kings and other civil authorities should be the
subordinates of Christ's Vicar upon earth. The Eastern Church, on the
contrary, has remained true to her Byzantine traditions, and has never

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dreamed of such lofty pretensions. Accustomed to lean on the civil power,
she has always been content to play a secondary part, and has never
strenuously resisted the formation of national churches.
For about two centuries after the introduction of Christianity—from 988
to 1240—Russia formed, ecclesiastically speaking, part of the Patriarchate
of Constantinople. The metropolitans and the bishops were Greek by birth
and education, and the ecclesiastical administration was guided and
controlled by the Byzantine Patriarchs. But from the time of the Mongol
invasion, when communication with Constantinople became more difficult
and educated native priests had become more numerous, this complete
dependence on the Patriarch of Constantinople ceased. The Princes
gradually arrogated to themselves the right of choosing the Metropolitan of
Kief—who was at that time the chief ecclesiastical dignitary in Russia—
and merely sent their nominees to Constantinople for consecration. About
1448 this formality came to be dispensed with, and the Metropolitan was
commonly consecrated by a Council of Russian bishops. A further step in
the direction of ecclesiastical autonomy was taken in 1589, when the Tsar
succeeded in procuring the consecration of a Russian Patriarch, equal in
dignity and authority to the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Jerusalem,
Antioch, and Alexandria.
In all matters of external form the Patriarch of Moscow was a very
important personage. He exercised a certain influence in civil as well as
ecclesiastical affairs, bore the official title of "Great Lord" (Veliki Gosudar),
which had previously been reserved for the civil head of the State, and
habitually received from the people scarcely less veneration than the Tsar
himself. But in reality he possessed very little independent power. The Tsar
was the real ruler in ecclesiastical as well as in civil affairs.*

* As this is frequently denied by Russians, it may be well
to quote one authority out of many that might be cited.
Bishop Makarii, whose erudition and good faith are alike
above suspicion, says of Dmitri of the Don: "He arrogated to
himself full, unconditional power over the Head of the
Russian Church, and through him over the whole Russian
Church itself." ("Istoriya Russkoi Tserkvi," V., p. 101.)
This is said of a Grand Prince who had strong rivals and had
to treat the Church as an ally. When the Grand Princes
became Tsars and had no longer any rivals, their power was
certainly not diminished. Any further confirmation that may
be required will be found in the Life of the famous
Patriarch Nikon.

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The Russian Patriarchate came to an end in the time of Peter the Great.
Peter wished, among other things, to reform the ecclesiastical
administration, and to introduce into his country many novelties which the
majority of the clergy and of the people regarded as heretical; and he clearly
perceived that a bigoted, energetic Patriarch might throw considerable
obstacles in his way, and cause him infinite annoyance. Though such a
Patriarch might be deposed without any flagrant violation of the canonical
formalities, the operation would necessarily be attended with great trouble
and loss of time. Peter was no friend of roundabout, tortuous methods, and
preferred to remove the difficulty in his usual thorough, violent fashion.
When the Patriarch Adrian died, the customary short interregnum was
prolonged for twenty years, and when the people had thus become
accustomed to having no Patriarch, it was announced that no more
Patriarchs would be elected. Their place was supplied by an ecclesiastical
council, or Synod, in which, as a contemporary explained, "the mainspring
was Peter's power, and the pendulum his understanding." The great autocrat
justly considered that such a council could be much more easily managed
than a stubborn Patriarch, and the wisdom of the measure has been duly
appreciated by succeeding sovereigns. Though the idea of re-establishing
the Patriarchate has more than once been raised, it has never been carried
into execution. The Holy Synod remains the highest ecclesiastical authority.
But the Emperor? What is his relation to the Synod and to the Church in
general?
This is a question about which zealous Orthodox Russians are extremely
sensitive. If a foreigner ventures to hint in their presence that the Emperor
seems to have a considerable influence in the Church, he may inadvertently
produce a little outburst of patriotic warmth and virtuous indignation. The
truth is that many Russians have a pet theory on this subject, and have at the
same time a dim consciousness that the theory is not quite in accordance
with reality. They hold theoretically that the Orthodox Church has no
"Head" but Christ, and is in some peculiar undefined sense entirely
independent of all terrestrial authority. In this respect it is often contrasted
with the Anglican Church, much to the disadvantage of the latter; and the
supposed differences between the two are made a theme for semi-religious,
semi-patriotic exultation. Khomiakof, for instance, in one of his most
vigorous poems, predicts that God will one day take the destiny of the
world out of the hands of England in order to give it to Russia, and he

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adduces as one of the reasons for this transfer the fact that England "has
chained, with sacrilegious hand, the Church of God to the pedestal of the
vain earthly power." So far the theory. As to the facts, it is unquestionable
that the Tsar exercises a much greater influence in ecclesiastical affairs than
the King and Parliament in England. All who know the internal history of
Russia are aware that the Government does not draw a clear line of
distinction between the temporal and the spiritual, and that it occasionally
uses the ecclesiastical organisation for political purposes.
What, then, are the relations between Church and State?
To avoid confusion, we must carefully distinguish between the Eastern
Orthodox Church as a whole and that section of it which is known as the
Russian Church.
The Eastern Orthodox Church* is, properly speaking, a confederation of
independent churches without any central authority—a unity founded on the
possession of a common dogma and on the theoretical but now unrealisable
possibility of holding Ecumenical Councils. The Russian National Church
is one of the members of this ecclesiastical confederation. In matters of
faith it is bound by the decisions of the ancient Ecumenical Councils, but in
all other respects it enjoys complete independence and autonomy.

* Or Greek Orthodox Church, as it is sometimes called.

In relation to the Orthodox Church as a whole the Emperor of Russia is
nothing more than a simple member, and can no more interfere with its
dogmas or ceremonial than a King of Italy or an Emperor of the French
could modify Roman Catholic theology; but in relation to the Russian
National Church his position is peculiar. He is described in one of the
fundamental laws as "the supreme defender and preserver of the dogmas of
the dominant faith," and immediately afterwards it is said that "the
autocratic power acts in the ecclesiastical administration by means of the
most Holy Governing Synod, created by it."* This describes very fairly the
relations between the Emperor and the Church. He is merely the defender of
the dogmas, and cannot in the least modify them; but he is at the same time
the chief administrator, and uses the Synod as an instrument.

* Svod Zakonov I., 42, 43.

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Some ingenious people who wish to prove that the creation of the Synod
was not an innovation represent the institution as a resuscitation of the
ancient local councils; but this view is utterly untenable. The Synod is not a
council of deputies from various sections of the Church, but a permanent
college, or ecclesiastical senate, the members of which are appointed and
dismissed by the Emperor as he thinks fit. It has no independent legislative
authority, for its legislative projects do not become law till they have
received the Imperial sanction; and they are always published, not in the
name of the Church, but in the name of the Supreme Power. Even in matters
of simple administration it is not independent, for all its resolutions require
the consent of the Procureur, a layman nominated by his Majesty. In theory
this functionary protests only against those resolutions which are not in
accordance with the civil law of the country; but as he alone has the right to
address the Emperor directly on ecclesiastical concerns, and as all
communications between the Emperor and the Synod pass through his
hands, he possesses in reality considerable power. Besides this, he can
always influence the individual members by holding out prospects of
advancement and decorations, and if this device fails, he can make
refractory members retire, and fill up their places with men of more pliant
disposition. A Council constituted in this way cannot, of course, display
much independence of thought or action, especially in a country like
Russia, where no one ventures to oppose openly the Imperial will.
It must not, however, be supposed that the Russian ecclesiastics regard
the Imperial authority with jealousy or dislike. They are all most loyal
subjects, and warm adherents of autocracy. Those ideas of ecclesiastical
independence which are so common in Western Europe, and that spirit of
opposition to the civil power which animates the Roman Catholic clergy,
are entirely foreign to their minds. If a bishop sometimes complains to an
intimate friend that he has been brought to St. Petersburg and made a
member of the Synod merely to append his signature to official papers and
to give his consent to foregone conclusions, his displeasure is directed, not
against the Emperor, but against the Procureur. He is full of loyalty and
devotion to the Tsar, and has no desire to see his Majesty excluded from all
influence in ecclesiastical affairs; but he feels saddened and humiliated
when he finds that the whole government of the Church is in the hands of a
lay functionary, who may be a military man, and who looks at all matters
from a layman's point of view.

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This close connection between Church and State and the thoroughly
national character of the Russian Church is well illustrated by the history of
the local ecclesiastical administration. The civil and the ecclesiastical
administration have always had the same character and have always been
modified by the same influences. The terrorism which was largely used by
the Muscovite Tsars and brought to a climax by Peter the Great appeared
equally in both. In the episcopal circulars, as in the Imperial ukazes, we find
frequent mention of "most cruel corporal punishment," "cruel punishment
with whips, so that the delinquent and others may not acquire the habit of
practising such insolence," and much more of the same kind. And these
terribly severe measures were sometimes directed against very venial
offences. The Bishop of Vologda, for instance, in 1748 decrees "cruel
corporal punishment" against priests who wear coarse and ragged clothes,*
and the records of the Consistorial courts contain abundant proof that such
decrees were rigorously executed. When Catherine II. introduced a more
humane spirit into the civil administration, corporal punishment was at once
abolished in the Consistorial courts, and the procedure was modified
according to the accepted maxims of civil jurisprudence. But I must not
weary the reader with tiresome historical details. Suffice it to say that, from
the time of Peter the Great downwards, the character of all the more
energetic sovereigns is reflected in the history of the ecclesiastical
administration.

* Znamenski, "Prikhodskoe Dukhovenstvo v Rossii so vremeni
reformy Petra," Kazan, 1873.

Each province, or "government," forms a diocese, and the bishop, like the
civil governor, has a Council which theoretically controls his power, but
practically has no controlling influence whatever. The Consistorial Council,
which has in the theory of ecclesiastical procedure a very imposing
appearance, is in reality the bishop's chancellerie, and its members are little
more than secretaries, whose chief object is to make themselves agreeable
to their superior. And it must be confessed that, so long as they remain what
they are, the less power they possess the better it will be for those who have
the misfortune to be under their jurisdiction. The higher dignitaries have at
least larger aims and a certain consciousness of the dignity of their position;
but the lower officials, who have no such healthy restraints and receive
ridiculously small salaries, grossly misuse the little authority which they

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possess, and habitually pilfer and extort in the most shameless manner. The
Consistories are, in fact, what the public offices were in the time of
Nicholas I.
The higher ecclesiastical administration has always been in the hands of
the monks, or "Black Clergy," as they are commonly termed, who form a
large and influential class. The monks who first settled in Russia were, like
those who first visited north-western Europe, men of the earnest, ascetic,
missionary type. Filled with zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of
souls, they took little or no thought for the morrow, and devoutly believed
that their Heavenly Father, without whose knowledge no sparrow falls to
the ground, would provide for their humble wants. Poor, clad in rags, eating
the most simple fare, and ever ready to share what they had with any one
poorer than themselves, they performed faithfully and earnestly the work
which their Master had given them to do. But this ideal of monastic life
soon gave way in Russia, as in the West, to practices less simple and
austere. By the liberal donations and bequests of the faithful the
monasteries became rich in gold, in silver, in precious stones, and above all
in land and serfs. Troitsa, for instance, possessed at one time 120,000 serfs
and a proportionate amount of land, and it is said that at the beginning of
the eighteenth century more than a fourth of the entire population had fallen
under the jurisdiction of the Church. Many of the monasteries engaged in
commerce, and the monks were, if we may credit Fletcher, who visited
Russia in 1588, the most intelligent merchants of the country.
During the eighteenth century the Church lands were secularised, and the
serfs of the Church became serfs of the State. This was a severe blow for
the monasteries, but it did not prove fatal, as many people predicted. Some
monasteries were abolished and others were reduced to extreme poverty,
but many survived and prospered. These could no longer possess serfs, but
they had still three sources of revenue: a limited amount of real property,
Government subsidies, and the voluntary offerings of the faithful. At
present there are about 500 monastic establishments, and the great majority
of them, though not wealthy, have revenues more than sufficient to satisfy
all the requirements of an ascetic life.
Thus in Russia, as in Western Europe, the history of monastic institutions
is composed of three chapters, which may be briefly entitled: asceticism
and missionary enterprise; wealth, luxury, and corruption; secularisation of

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property and decline. But between Eastern and Western monasticism there
is at least one marked difference. The monasticism of the West made at
various epochs of its history a vigorous, spontaneous effort at self-
regeneration, which found expression in the foundation of separate Orders,
each of which proposed to itself some special aim—some special sphere of
usefulness. In Russia we find no similar phenomenon. Here the monasteries
never deviated from the rules of St. Basil, which restrict the members to
religious ceremonies, prayer, and contemplation. From time to time a
solitary individual raised his voice against the prevailing abuses, or retired
from his monastery to spend the remainder of his days in ascetic solitude;
but neither in the monastic population as a whole, nor in any particular
monastery, do we find at any time a spontaneous, vigorous movement
towards reform. During the last two hundred years reforms have certainly
been effected, but they have all been the work of the civil power, and in the
realisation of them the monks have shown little more than the virtue of
resignation. Here, as elsewhere, we have evidence of that inertness, apathy,
and want of spontaneous vigour which form one of the most characteristic
traits of Russian national life. In this, as in other departments of national
activity, the spring of action has lain not in the people, but in the
Government.
It is only fair to the monks to state that in their dislike to progress and
change of every kind they merely reflect the traditional spirit of the Church
to which they belong. The Russian Church, like the Eastern Orthodox
Church generally, is essentially conservative. Anything in the nature of a
religious revival is foreign to her traditions and character. Quieta non
movere is her fundamental principle of conduct. She prides herself as being
above terrestrial influences.
The modifications that have been made in her administrative organisation
have not affected her inner nature. In spirit and character she is now what
she was under the Patriarchs in the time of the Muscovite Tsars, holding fast
to the promise that no jot or tittle shall pass from the law till all be fulfilled.
To those who talk about the requirements of modern life and modern
science she turns a deaf ear. Partly from the predominance which she gives
to the ceremonial element, partly from the fact that her chief aim is to
preserve unmodified the doctrine and ceremonial as determined by the early
Ecumenical Councils, and partly from the low state of general culture
among the clergy, she has ever remained outside of the intellectual

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movements. The attempts of the Roman Catholic Church to develop the
traditional dogmas by definition and deduction, and the efforts of
Protestants to reconcile their creeds with progressive science and the ever-
varying intellectual currents of the time, are alike foreign to her nature.
Hence she has produced no profound theological treatises conceived in a
philosophical spirit, and has made no attempt to combat the spirit of
infidelity in its modern forms. Profoundly convinced that her position is
impregnable, she has "let the nations rave," and scarcely deigned to cast a
glance at their intellectual and religious struggles. In a word, she is "in the
world, but not of it."
If we wish to see represented in a visible form the peculiar characteristics
of the Russian Church, we have only to glance at Russian religious art, and
compare it with that of Western Europe. In the West, from the time of the
Renaissance downwards, religious art has kept pace with artistic progress.
Gradually it emancipated itself from archaic forms and childish symbolism,
converted the lifeless typical figures into living individuals, lit up their dull
eyes and expressionless faces with human intelligence and human feeling,
and finally aimed at archaeological accuracy in costume and other details.
Thus in the West the Icon grew slowly into the naturalistic portrait, and the
rude symbolical groups developed gradually into highly-finished historical
pictures. In Russia the history of religious art has been entirely different.
Instead of distinctive schools of painting and great religious artists, there
has been merely an anonymous traditional craft, destitute of any artistic
individuality. In all the productions of this craft the old Byzantine forms
have been faithfully and rigorously preserved, and we can see reflected in
the modern Icons—stiff, archaic, expressionless—the immobility of the
Eastern Church in general, and of the Russian Church in particular.
To the Roman Catholic, who struggles against science as soon as it
contradicts traditional conceptions, and to the Protestant, who strives to
bring his religious beliefs into accordance with his scientific knowledge, the
Russian Church may seem to resemble an antediluvian petrifaction, or a
cumbrous line-of-battle ship that has been long stranded. It must be
confessed, however, that the serene inactivity for which she is distinguished
has had very valuable practical consequences. The Russian clergy have
neither that haughty, aggressive intolerance which characterises their
Roman Catholic brethren, nor that bitter, uncharitable, sectarian spirit which
is too often to be found among Protestants. They allow not only to heretics,

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but also to members of their own communion, the most complete
intellectual freedom, and never think of anathematising any one for his
scientific or unscientific opinions. All that they demand is that those who
have been born within the pale of Orthodoxy should show the Church a
certain nominal allegiance; and in this matter of allegiance they are by no
mean very exacting. So long as a member refrains from openly attacking
the Church and from going over to another confession, he may entirely
neglect all religious ordinances and publicly profess scientific theories
logically inconsistent with any kind of dogmatic religious belief without the
slightest danger of incurring ecclesiastical censure.
This apathetic tolerance may be partly explained by the national
character, but it is also to some extent due to the peculiar relations between
Church and State. The government vigilantly protects the Church from
attack, and at the same time prevents her from attacking her enemies. Hence
religious questions are never discussed in the Press, and the ecclesiastical
literature is all historical, homiletic, or devotional. The authorities allow
public oral discussions to be held during Lent in the Kremlin of Moscow
between members of the State Church and Old Ritualists; but these debates
are not theological in our sense of the term. They turn exclusively on details
of Church history, and on the minutiae of ceremonial observance.
A few years ago there was a good deal of vague talk about a possible
union of the Russian and Anglican Churches. If by "union" is meant simply
union in the bonds of brotherly love, there can be, of course, no objection to
any amount of such pia desideria; but if anything more real and practical is
intended, the project is an absurdity. A real union of the Russian and
Anglican Churches would be as difficult of realisation, and is as
undesirable, as a union of the Russian Council of State and the British
House of Commons.*

* I suppose that the more serious partisans of the union
scheme mean union with the Eastern Orthodox, and not with
the Russian, Church. To them the above remarks are not
addressed. Their scheme is, in my opinion, unrealisable and
undesirable, but it contains nothing absurd.

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CHAPTER XX
THE NOBLESSE

The Nobles In Early Times—The Mongol Domination—The Tsardom of
Muscovy—Family Dignity—Reforms of Peter the Great—The Nobles
Adopt West-European Conceptions—Abolition of Obligatory Service—
Influence of Catherine II.—The Russian Dvoryanstvo Compared with the
French Noblesse and the English Aristocracy—Russian Titles—Probable
Future of the Russian Noblesse.
Hitherto I have been compelling the reader to move about among what
we should call the lower classes—peasants, burghers, traders, parish priests,
Dissenters, heretics, Cossacks, and the like—and he feels perhaps inclined
to complain that he has had no opportunity of mixing with what old-
fashioned people call gentle-folk and persons of quality. By way of making
amends to him for this reprehensible conduct on my part, I propose now to
present him to the whole Noblesse* in a body, not only those at present
living, but also their near and distant ancestors, right back to the foundation
of the Russian Empire a thousand years ago. Thereafter I shall introduce
him to some of the country families and invite him to make with me a few
country-house visits.

* I use here a foreign, in preference to an English, term,
because the word "Nobility" would convey a false impression.
Etymologically the Russian word "Dvoryanin" means a Courtier
(from Dvor=court); but this term is equally objectionable,
because the great majority of the Dvoryanstvo have nothing
to do with the Court.

In the old times, when Russia was merely a collection of some seventy
independent principalities, each reigning prince was surrounded by a group
of armed men, composed partly of Boyars, or large landed proprietors, and
partly of knights, or soldiers of fortune. These men, who formed the
Noblesse of the time, were to a certain extent under the authority of the
Prince, but they were by no means mere obedient, silent executors of his
will. The Boyars might refuse to take part in his military expeditions, and
the "free-lances" might leave his service and seek employment elsewhere. If

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he wished to go to war without their consent, they could say to him, as they
did on one occasion, "You have planned this yourself, Prince, so we will not
go with you, for we knew nothing of it." Nor was this resistance to the
princely will always merely passive. Once, in the principality of Galitch,
the armed men seized their prince, killed his favourites, burned his mistress,
and made him swear that he would in future live with his lawful wife. To
his successor, who had married the wife of a priest, they spoke thus: "We
have not risen against YOU, Prince, but we will not do reverence to a
priest's wife: we will put her to death, and then you may marry whom you
please." Even the energetic Bogolubski, one of the most remarkable of the
old Princes, did not succeed in having his own way. When he attempted to
force the Boyars he met with stubborn opposition, and was finally
assassinated. From these incidents, which might be indefinitely multiplied
from the old chronicles, we see that in the early period of Russian history
the Boyars and knights were a body of free men, possessing a considerable
amount of political power.
Under the Mongol domination this political equilibrium was destroyed.
When the country had been conquered, the Princes became servile vassals
of the Khan and arbitrary rulers towards their own subjects. The political
significance of the nobles was thereby greatly diminished. It was not,
however, by any means annihilated. Though the Prince no longer depended
entirely on their support, he had an interest in retaining their services, to
protect his territory in case of sudden attack, or to increase his possessions
at the expense of his neighbours when a convenient opportunity presented
itself. Theoretically, such conquests were impossible, for all removing of
the ancient landmarks depended on the decision of the Khan; but in reality
the Khan paid little attention to the affairs of his vassals so long as the
tribute was regularly paid; and much took place in Russia without his
permission. We find, therefore, in some of the principalities the old relations
still subsisting under Mongol rule. The famous Dmitri of the Don, for
instance, when on his death-bed, speaks thus to his Boyars: "You know my
habits and my character; I was born among you, grew up among you,
governed with you—fighting by your side, showing you honour and love,
and placing you over towns and districts. I loved your children, and did evil
to no one. I rejoiced with you in your joy, mourned with you in your grief,
and called you the princes of my land." Then, turning to his children, he
adds, as a parting advice: "Love your Boyars, my children; show them the

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honour which their services merit, and undertake nothing without their
consent."
When the Grand Princes of Moscow brought the other principalities
under their power, and formed them into the Tsardom of Muscovy, the
nobles descended another step in the political scale. So long as there were
many principalities they could quit the service of a Prince as soon as he
gave them reason to be discontented, knowing that they would be well
received by one of his rivals; but now they had no longer any choice. The
only rival of Moscow was Lithuania, and precautions were taken to prevent
the discontented from crossing the Lithuanian frontier. The nobles were no
longer voluntary adherents of a Prince, but had become subjects of a Tsar;
and the Tsars were not as the old Princes had been. By a violent legal fiction
they conceived themselves to be the successors of the Byzantine Emperors,
and created a new court ceremonial, borrowed partly from Constantinople
and partly from the Mongol Horde. They no longer associated familiarly
with the Boyars, and no longer asked their advice, but treated them rather as
menials. When the nobles entered their august master's presence they
prostrated themselves in Oriental fashion—occasionally as many as thirty
times—and when they incurred his displeasure they were summarily
flogged or executed, according to the Tsar's good pleasure. In succeeding to
the power of the Khans, the Tsars had adopted, we see, a good deal of the
Mongol system of government.
It may seem strange that a class of men which had formerly shown a
proud spirit of independence should have submitted quietly to such
humiliation and oppression without making a serious effort to curb the new
power, which had no longer a Tartar Horde at its back to quell opposition.
But we must remember that the nobles, as well as the Princes, had passed in
the meantime through the school of the Mongol domination. In the course
of two centuries they had gradually become accustomed to despotic rule in
the Oriental sense. If they felt their position humiliating and irksome, they
must have felt, too, how difficult it was to better it. Their only resource lay
in combining against the common oppressor; and we have only to glance at
the motley, disorganised group, as they cluster round the Tsar, to perceive
that combination was extremely difficult. We can distinguish there the
mediatised Princes, still harbouring designs for the recovery of their
independence; the Moscow Boyars, jealous of their family honour and
proud of Muscovite supremacy; Tartar Murzi, who have submitted to be

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baptised and have received land like the other nobles; the Novgorodian
magnate, who cannot forget the ancient glory of his native city; Lithuanian
nobles, who find it more profitable to serve the Tsar than their own
sovereign; petty chiefs who have fled from the opposition of the Teutonic
order; and soldiers of fortune from every part of Russia. Strong, permanent
political factors are not easily formed out of such heterogeneous material.
At the end of the sixteenth century the old dynasty became extinct, and
after a short period of political anarchy, commonly called "the troublous
times" (smutnoe vremya), the Romanof family were raised to the throne by
the will of the people, or at least by those who were assumed to be its
representatives. By this change the Noblesse acquired a somewhat better
position. They were no longer exposed to capricious tyranny and barbarous
cruelty, such as they had experienced at the hands of Ivan the Terrible, but
they did not, as a class, gain any political influence. There were still rival
families and rival factions, but there were no political parties in the proper
sense of the term, and the highest aim of families and factions was to gain
the favour of the Tsar.
The frequent quarrels about precedence which took place among the rival
families at this period form one of the most curious episodes of Russian
history. The old patriarchal conception of the family as a unit, one and
indivisible, was still so strong among these men that the elevation or
degradation of one member of a family was considered to affect deeply the
honour of all the other members. Each noble family had its rank in a
recognised scale of dignity, according to the rank which it held, or had
previously held, in the Tsar's service; and a whole family would have
considered itself dishonoured if one of its members accepted a post lower
than that to which he was entitled. Whenever a vacant place in the service
was filled up, the subordinates of the successful candidate examined the
official records and the genealogical trees of their families, in order to
discover whether some ancestor of their new superior had not served under
one of their own ancestors. If the subordinate found such a case, he
complained to the Tsar that it was not becoming for him to serve under a
man who had less family honour than himself.
Unfounded complaints of this kind often entailed imprisonment or
corporal punishment, but in spite of this the quarrels for precedence were
very frequent. At the commencement of a campaign many such disputes

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were sure to arise, and the Tsar's decision was not always accepted by the
party who considered himself aggrieved. I have met at least with one
example of a great dignitary voluntarily mutilating his hand in order to
escape the necessity of serving under a man whom he considered his
inferior in family dignity. Even at the Tsar's table these rivalries sometimes
produced unseemly incidents, for it was almost impossible to arrange the
places so as to satisfy all the guests. In one recorded instance a noble who
received a place lower than that to which he considered himself entitled
openly declared to the Tsar that he would rather be condemned to death
than submit to such an indignity. In another instance of a similar kind the
refractory guest was put on his chair by force, but saved his family honour
by slipping under the table!
The next transformation of the Noblesse was effected by Peter the Great.
Peter was by nature and position an autocrat, and could brook no
opposition. Having set before himself a great aim, he sought everywhere
obedient, intelligent, energetic instruments to carry out his designs. He
himself served the State zealously—as a common artisan, when he
considered it necessary—and he insisted on all his subjects doing likewise,
under pain of merciless punishment. To noble birth and long pedigrees he
habitually showed a most democratic, or rather autocratic, indifference.
Intent on obtaining the service of living men, he paid no attention to the
claims of dead ancestors, and gave to his servants the pay and honour which
their services merited, irrespectively of birth or social position. Hence many
of his chief coadjutors had no connection with the old Russian families.
Count Yaguzhinski, who long held one of the most important posts in the
State, was the son of a poor sacristan; Count Devier was a Portuguese by
birth, and had been a cabin-boy; Baron Shafirof was a Jew; Hannibal, who
died with the rank of Commander in Chief, was a negro who had been
bought in Constantinople; and his Serene Highness Prince Menshikof had
begun life, it was said, as a baker's apprentice! For the future, noble birth
was to count for nothing. The service of the State was thrown open to men
of all ranks, and personal merit was to be the only claim to promotion.
This must have seemed to the Conservatives of the time a most
revolutionary and reprehensible proceeding, but it did not satisfy the
reforming tendencies of the great autocrat. He went a step further, and
entirely changed the legal status of the Noblesse. Down to his time the
nobles were free to serve or not as they chose, and those who chose to serve

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enjoyed land on what we should call a feudal tenure. Some served
permanently in the military or civil administration, but by far the greater
number lived on their estates, and entered the active service merely when
the militia was called out in view of war. This system was completely
changed when Peter created a large standing army and a great centralised
bureaucracy. By one of those "fell swoops" which periodically occur in
Russian history, he changed the feudal into freehold tenures, and laid down
the principle that all nobles, whatever their landed possessions might be,
should serve the State in the army, the fleet, or the civil administration,
from boyhood to old age. In accordance with this principle, any noble who
refused to serve was not only deprived of his estate, as in the old times, but
was declared to be a traitor and might be condemned to capital punishment.
The nobles were thus transformed into servants of the State, and the State
in the time of Peter was a hard taskmaster. They complained bitterly, and
with reason, that they had been deprived of their ancient rights, and were
compelled to accept quietly and uncomplainingly whatever burdens their
master chose to place upon them. "Though our country," they said, "is in no
danger of invasion, no sooner is peace concluded than plans are laid for a
new war, which has generally no other foundation than the ambition of the
Sovereign, or perhaps merely the ambition of one of his Ministers. To
please him our peasants are utterly exhausted, and we ourselves are forced
to leave our homes and families, not as formerly for a single campaign, but
for long years. We are compelled to contract debts and to entrust our estates
to thieving overseers, who commonly reduce them to such a condition that
when we are allowed to retire from the service, in consequence of old age
or illness, we cannot to the end of our lives retrieve our prosperity. In a
word, we are so exhausted and ruined by the keeping up of a standing army,
and by the consequences flowing therefrom, that the most cruel enemy,
though he should devastate the whole Empire, could not cause us one-half
of the injury."*

* These complaints have been preserved by Vockerodt, a
Prussian diplomatic agent of the time.

This Spartan regime, which ruthlessly sacrificed private interests to
considerations of State policy, could not long be maintained in its pristine
severity. It undermined its own foundations by demanding too much.
Draconian laws threatening confiscation and capital punishment were of

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little avail. Nobles became monks, inscribed themselves as merchants, or
engaged themselves as domestic servants, in order to escape their
obligations. "Some," says a contemporary, "grow old in disobedience and
have never once appeared in active service. . . . There is, for instance,
Theodore Mokeyef. . . . In spite of the strict orders sent regarding him no
one could ever catch him. Some of those sent to take him he belaboured
with blows, and when he could not beat the messengers, he pretended to be
dangerously ill, or feigned idiocy, and, running into the pond, stood in the
water up to his neck; but as soon as the messengers were out of sight he
returned home and roared like a lion." *

* Pososhkof, "O skudosti i bogatstve."

After Peter's death the system was gradually relaxed, but the Noblesse
could not be satisfied by partial concessions. Russia had in the meantime
moved, as it were, out of Asia into Europe, and had become one of the great
European Powers. The upper classes had been gradually learning something
of the fashions, the literature, the institutions, and the moral conceptions of
Western Europe, and the nobles naturally compared the class to which they
belonged with the aristocracies of Germany and France. For those who
were influenced by the new foreign ideas the comparison was humiliating.
In the West the Noblesse was a free and privileged class, proud of its
liberty, its rights, and its culture; whereas in Russia the nobles were servants
of the State, without privileges, without dignity, subject to corporal
punishment, and burdened with onerous duties from which there was no
escape. Thus arose in that section of the Noblesse which had some
acquaintance with Western civilisation a feeling of discontent, and a desire
to gain a social position similar to that of the nobles in France and
Germany. These aspirations were in part realised by Peter III., who in 1762
abolished the principle of obligatory service. His consort, Catherine II.,
went much farther in the same direction, and inaugurated a new epoch in
the history of the Dvoryanstvo, a period in which its duties and obligations
fell into the background, and its rights and privileges came to the front.
Catherine had good reason to favour the Noblesse. As a foreigner and a
usurper, raised to the throne by a Court conspiracy, she could not awaken in
the masses that semi-religious veneration which the legitimate Tsars have
always enjoyed, and consequently she had to seek support in the upper
classes, who were less rigid and uncompromising in their conceptions of

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legitimacy. She confirmed, therefore, the ukaz which abolished obligatory
service of the nobles, and sought to gain their voluntary service by honours
and rewards. In her manifestoes she always spoke of them in the most
flattering terms; and tried to convince them that the welfare of the country
depended on their loyalty and devotion. Though she had no intention of
ceding any of her political power, she formed the nobles of each province
into a corporation, with periodical assemblies, which were supposed to
resemble the French Provincial Parliaments, and entrusted to each of these
corporations a large part of the local administration. By these and similar
means, aided by her masculine energy and feminine tact, she made herself
very popular, and completely changed the old conceptions about the public
service. Formerly service had been looked on as a burden; now it came to
be looked on as a privilege. Thousands who had retired to their estates after
the publication of the liberation edict now flocked back and sought
appointments, and this tendency was greatly increased by the brilliant
campaigns against the Turks, which excited the patriotic feelings and gave
plentiful opportunities of promotion. "Not only landed proprietors," it is
said in a comedy of the time,* "but all men, even shopkeepers and cobblers,
aim at becoming officers, and the man who has passed his whole life
without official rank seems to be not a human being."

* Knyazhnina, "Khvastun."

And Catherine did more than this. She shared the idea—generally
accepted throughout Europe since the brilliant reign of Louis XIV.—that a
refined, pomp-loving, pleasure-seeking Court Noblesse was not only the
best bulwark of Monarchy, but also a necessary ornament of every highly
civilised State; and as she ardently desired that her country should have the
reputation of being highly civilised, she strove to create this national
ornament. The love of French civilisation, which already existed among the
upper classes of her subjects, here came to her aid, and her efforts in this
direction were singularly successful. The Court of St. Petersburg became
almost as brilliant, as galant, and as frivolous as the Court of Versailles. All
who aimed at high honours adopted French fashions, spoke the French
language, and affected an unqualified admiration for French classical
literature. The Courtiers talked of the point d'honneur, discussed the
question as to what was consistent with the dignity of a noble, sought to
display "that chivalrous spirit which constitutes the pride and ornament of

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France"; and looked back with horror on the humiliating position of their
fathers and grandfathers. "Peter the Great," writes one of them, "beat all
who surrounded him, without distinction of family or rank; but now, many
of us would certainly prefer capital punishment to being beaten or flogged,
even though the castigation were applied by the sacred hands of the Lord's
Anointed."
The tone which reigned in the Court circle of St. Petersburg spread
gradually towards the lower ranks of the Dvoryanstvo, and it seemed to
superficial observers that a very fair imitation of the French Noblesse had
been produced; but in reality the copy was very unlike the model. The
Russian Dvoryanin easily learned the language and assumed the manners of
the French gentilhomme, and succeeded in changing his physical and
intellectual exterior; but all those deeper and more delicate parts of human
nature which are formed by the accumulated experience of past generations
could not be so easily and rapidly changed. The French gentilhomme of the
eighteenth century was the direct descendant of the feudal baron, with the
fundamental conceptions of his ancestors deeply embedded in his nature.
He had not, indeed, the old haughty bearing towards the Sovereign, and his
language was tinged with the fashionable democratic philosophy of the
time; but he possessed a large intellectual and moral inheritance that had
come down to him directly from the palmy days of feudalism—an
inheritance which even the Great Revolution, which was then preparing,
could not annihilate. The Russian noble, on the contrary, had received from
his ancestors entirely different traditions. His father and grandfather had
been conscious of the burdens rather than the privileges of the class to
which they belonged. They had considered it no disgrace to receive corporal
punishment, and had been jealous of their honour, not as gentlemen or
descendants of Boyars, but as Brigadiers, College Assessors, or Privy
Counsellors. Their dignity had rested not on the grace of God, but on the
will of the Tsar. Under these circumstances even the proudest magnate of
Catherine's Court, though he might speak French as fluently as his mother
tongue, could not be very deeply penetrated with the conception of noble
blood, the sacred character of nobility, and the numerous feudal ideas
interwoven with these conceptions. And in adopting the outward forms of a
foreign culture the nobles did not, it seems, gain much in true dignity. "The
old pride of the nobles has fallen!" exclaims one who had more genuine
aristocratic feeling than his fellows.* "There are no longer any honourable

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families; but merely official rank and personal merits. All seek official rank,
and as all cannot render direct services, distinctions are sought by every
possible means—by flattering the Monarch and toadying the important
personages." There was considerable truth in this complaint, but the voice
of this solitary aristocrat was as of one crying in the wilderness. The whole
of the educated classes—men of old family and parvenus alike—were, with
few exceptions, too much engrossed with place-hunting to attend to such
sentimental wailing.

* Prince Shtcherbatof.

If the Russian Noblesse was thus in its new form but a very imperfect
imitation of its French model, it was still more unlike the English
aristocracy. Notwithstanding the liberal phrases in which Catherine
habitually indulged, she never had the least intention of ceding one jot or
tittle of her autocratic power, and the Noblesse as a class never obtained
even a shadow of political influence. There was no real independence under
the new airs of dignity and hauteur. In all their acts and openly expressed
opinions the courtiers were guided by the real or supposed wishes of the
Sovereign, and much of their political sagacity was employed in
endeavouring to discover what would please her. "People never talk politics
in the salons," says a contemporary witness,* "not even to praise the
Government. Fear has produced habits of prudence, and the Frondeurs of
the Capital express their opinions only in the confidence of intimate
friendship or in a relationship still more confidential. Those who cannot
bear this constraint retire to Moscow, which cannot be called the centre of
opposition, for there is no such thing as opposition in a country with an
autocratic Government, but which is the capital of the discontented." And
even there the discontent did not venture to show itself in the Imperial
presence. "In Moscow," says another witness, accustomed to the
obsequiousness of Versailles, "you might believe yourself to be among
republicans who have just thrown off the yoke of a tyrant, but as soon as the
Court arrives you see nothing but abject slaves."**

* Segur, long Ambassador of France at the Court of
Catherine.

** Sabathier de Cabres, "Catherine II. et la Cour de Russie
en 1772."

Page 317

Though thus excluded from direct influence in political affairs the
Noblesse might still have acquired a certain political significance in the
State, by means of the Provincial Assemblies, and by the part they took in
local administration; but in reality they had neither the requisite political
experience nor the requisite patience, nor even the desire to pursue such a
policy. The majority of the proprietors preferred the chances of promotion
in the Imperial service to the tranquil life of a country gentleman; and those
who resided permanently on their estates showed indifference or positive
antipathy to everything connected with the local administration. What was
officially described as "a privilege conferred on the nobles for their fidelity,
and for the generous sacrifice of their lives in their country's cause," was
regarded by those who enjoyed it as a new kind of obligatory service—an
obligation to supply judges and officers of rural police.
If we require any additional proof that the nobles amidst all these
changes were still as dependent as ever on the arbitrary will or caprice of
the Monarch, we have only to glance at their position in the time of Paul I.,
the capricious, eccentric, violent son and successor of Catherine. The
autobiographical memoirs of the time depict in vivid colours the
humiliating position of even the leading men in the State, in constant fear of
exciting by act, word, or look the wrath of the Sovereign. As we read these
contemporary records we seem to have before us a picture of ancient Rome
under the most despotic and capricious of her Emperors. Irritated and
embittered before his accession to the throne by the haughty demeanour of
his mother's favourites, Paul lost no opportunity of showing his contempt
for aristocratic pretensions, and of humiliating those who were supposed to
harbour them. "Apprenez, Monsieur," he said angrily on one occasion to
Dumouriez, who had accidentally referred to one of the "considerable"
personages of the Court, "Apprenez qu'il n'y a pas de considerable ici, que
la personne a laquelle je parle et pendant le temps que je lui parle!"*

* This saying is often falsely attributed to Nicholas. The
anecdote is related by Segur.

From the time of Catherine down to the accession of Alexander II. in
1855 no important change was made in the legal status of the Noblesse, but
a gradual change took place in its social character by the continual influx of
Western ideas and Western culture. The exclusively French culture in vogue
at the Court of Catherine assumed a more cosmopolitan colouring, and

Page 318

permeated downwards till all who had any pretensions to being civilises
spoke French with tolerable fluency and possessed at least a superficial
acquaintance with the literature of Western Europe. What chiefly
distinguished them in the eye of the law from the other classes was the
privilege of possessing "inhabited estates"—that is to say, estates with serfs.
By the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 this valuable privilege was
abolished, and about one-half of their landed property passed into the hands
of the peasantry. By the administrative reforms which have since taken
place, any little significance which the provincial corporations may have
possessed has been annihilated. Thus at the present day the nobles are on a
level with the other classes with regard to the right of possessing landed
property and the administration of local affairs.
From this rapid sketch the reader will easily perceive that the Russian
Noblesse has had a peculiar historical development. In Germany, France,
and England the nobles were early formed into a homogeneous organised
body by the political conditions in which they were placed. They had to
repel the encroaching tendencies of the Monarchy on the one hand, and of
the bourgeoisie on the other; and in this long struggle with powerful rivals
they instinctively held together and developed a vigorous esprit de corps.
New members penetrated into their ranks, but these intruders were so few in
number that they were rapidly assimilated without modifying the general
character or recognised ideals of the class, and without rudely disturbing the
fiction of purity of blood. The class thus assumed more and more the nature
of a caste with a peculiar intellectual and moral culture, and stoutly
defended its position and privileges till the ever-increasing power of the
middle classes undermined its influence. Its fate in different countries has
been different. In Germany it clung to its feudal traditions, and still
preserves its social exclusiveness. In France it was deprived of its political
influence by the Monarchy and crushed by the Revolution. In England it
moderated its pretensions, allied itself with the middle classes, created
under the disguise of constitutional monarchy an aristocratic republic, and
conceded inch by inch, as necessity demanded, a share of its political
influence to the ally that had helped it to curb the Royal power. Thus the
German baron, the French gentilhomme, and the English nobleman
represent three distinct, well-marked types; but amidst all their diversities
they have much in common. They have all preserved to a greater or less
extent a haughty consciousness of innate inextinguishable superiority over

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the lower orders, together with a more or less carefully disguised dislike for
the class which has been, and still is, an aggressive rival.
The Russian Noblesse has not these characteristics. It was formed out of
more heterogeneous materials, and these materials did not spontaneously
combine to form an organic whole, but were crushed into a conglomerate
mass by the weight of the autocratic power. It never became a semi-
independent factor in the State. What rights and privileges it possesses it
received from the Monarchy, and consequently it has no deep-rooted
jealousy or hatred of the Imperial prerogative. On the other hand, it has
never had to struggle with the other social classes, and therefore it harbours
towards them no feelings of rivalry or hostility. If we hear a Russian noble
speak with indignation of autocracy or with acrimony of the bourgeoisie,
we may be sure that these feelings have their source, not in traditional
conceptions, but in principles learned from the modern schools of social
and political philosophy. The class to which he belongs has undergone so
many transformations that it has no hoary traditions or deep-rooted
prejudices, and always willingly adapts itself to existing conditions. Indeed,
it may be said in general that it looks more to the future than the past, and is
ever ready to accept any new ideas that wear the badge of progress. Its
freedom from traditions and prejudices makes it singularly susceptible of
generous enthusiasm and capable of vigorous spasmodic action, but calm
moral courage and tenacity of purpose are not among its prominent
attributes. In a word, we find in it neither the peculiar virtues nor the
peculiar vices which are engendered and fostered by an atmosphere of
political liberty.
However we may explain the fact, there is no doubt that the Russian
Noblesse has little or nothing of what we call aristocratic feeling—little or
nothing of that haughty, domineering, exclusive spirit which we are
accustomed to associate with the word aristocracy. We find plenty of
Russians who are proud of their wealth, of their culture, or of their official
position, but we rarely find a Russian who is proud of his birth or imagines
that the fact of his having a long pedigree gives him any right to political
privileges or social consideration. Hence there is a certain amount of truth
in the oft-repeated saying that there is in reality no aristocracy in Russia.
Certainly the Noblesse as a whole cannot be called an aristocracy. If the
term is to be used at all, it must be applied to a group of families which

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cluster around the Court and form the highest ranks of the Noblesse. This
social aristocracy contains many old families, but its real basis is official
rank and general culture rather than pedigree or blood. The feudal
conceptions of noble birth, good family, and the like have been adopted by
some of its members, but do not form one of its conspicuous features.
Though habitually practising a certain exclusiveness, it has none of those
characteristics of a caste which we find in the German Adel, and is utterly
unable to understand such institutions as Tafelfähigkeit, by which a man
who has not a pedigree of a certain length is considered unworthy to sit
down at a royal table. It takes rather the English aristocracy as its model,
and harbours the secret hope of one day obtaining a social and political
position similar to that of the nobility and gentry of England. Though it has
no peculiar legal privileges, its actual position in the Administration and at
Court gives its members great facilities for advancement in the public
service. On the other hand, its semi-bureaucratic character, together with the
law and custom of dividing landed property among the children at the death
of their parents, deprives it of stability. New men force their way into it by
official distinction, whilst many of the old families are compelled by
poverty to retire from its ranks. The son of a small proprietor, or even of a
parish priest, may rise to the highest offices of State, whilst the descendants
of the half-mythical Rurik may descend to the position of peasants. It is said
that not very long ago a certain Prince Krapotkin gained his living as a
cabman in St. Petersburg!
It is evident, then, that this social aristocracy must not be confounded
with the titled families. Titles do not possess the same value in Russia as in
Western Europe. They are very common—because the titled families are
numerous, and all the children bear the titles of the parents even while the
parents are still alive—and they are by no means always associated with
official rank, wealth, social position, or distinction of any kind. There are
hundreds of princes and princesses who have not the right to appear at
Court, and who would not be admitted into what is called in St. Petersburg
la societe, or indeed into refined society in any country.
The only genuine Russian title is Knyaz, commonly translated "Prince."
It is borne by the descendants of Rurik, of the Lithuanian Prince Ghedimin,
and of the Tartar Khans and Murzi officially recognised by the Tsars.
Besides these, there are fourteen families who have adopted it by Imperial
command during the last two centuries. The titles of count and baron are

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modern importations, beginning with the time of Peter the Great. From
Peter and his successors about seventy families have received the title of
count and ten that of baron. The latter are all, with two exceptions, of
foreign extraction, and are mostly descended from Court bankers.*

* Besides these, there are of course the German counts and
barons of the Baltic Provinces, who are Russian subjects.

There is a very common idea that Russian nobles are as a rule
enormously rich. This is a mistake. The majority of them are poor. At the
time of the Emancipation, in 1861, there were 100,247 landed proprietors,
and of these, more than 41,000 were possessors of less than twenty-one
male serfs—that is to say, were in a condition of poverty. A proprietor who
was owner of 500 serfs was not considered as by any means very rich, and
yet there were only 3,803 proprietors belonging in that category. There were
a few, indeed, whose possessions were enormous. Count Sheremetief, for
instance, possessed more than 150,000 male serfs, or in other words more
than 300,000 souls; and thirty years ago Count Orloff-Davydof owned
considerably more than half a million of acres. The Demidof family derive
colossal revenues from their mines, and the Strogonofs have estates which,
if put together, would be sufficient in extent to form a good-sized
independent State in Western Europe. The very rich families, however, are
not numerous. The lavish expenditure in which Russian nobles often
indulge indicates too frequently not large fortune, but simply foolish
ostentation and reckless improvidence.
Perhaps, after having spoken so much about the past history of the
Noblesse, I ought to endeavour to cast its horoscope, or at least to say
something of its probable future. Though predictions are always hazardous,
it is sometimes possible, by tracing the great lines of history in the past, to
follow them for a little distance into the future. If it be allowable to apply
this method of prediction in the present matter, I should say that the Russian
Dvoryanstvo will assimilate with the other classes, rather than form itself
into an exclusive corporation. Hereditary aristocracies may be preserved—
or at least their decomposition may be retarded—where they happen to
exist, but it seems that they can no longer be created. In Western Europe
there is a large amount of aristocratic sentiment, both in the nobles and in
the people; but it exists in spite of, rather than in consequence of, actual
social conditions. It is not a product of modern society, but an heirloom that

Page 322

has come down to us from feudal times, when power, wealth, and culture
were in the hands of a privileged few. If there ever was in Russia a period
corresponding to the feudal times in Western Europe, it has long since been
forgotten. There is very little aristocratic sentiment either in the people or in
the nobles, and it is difficult to imagine any source from which it could now
be derived. More than this, the nobles do not desire to make such an
acquisition. In so far as they have any political aspirations, they aim at
securing the political liberty of the people as a whole, and not at acquiring
exclusive rights and privileges for their own class.
In that section which I have called a social aristocracy there are a few
individuals who desire to gain exclusive political influence for the class to
which they belong, but there is very little chance of their succeeding. If
their desires were ever by chance realised, we should probably have a
repetition of the scene which occurred in 1730. When in that year some of
the great families raised the Duchess of Courland to the throne on condition
of her ceding part of her power to a supreme council, the lower ranks of the
Noblesse compelled her to tear up the constitution which she had signed!
Those who dislike the autocratic power dislike the idea of an aristocratic
oligarchy infinitely more. Nobles and people alike seem to hold
instinctively the creed of the French philosopher, who thought it better to be
governed by a lion of good family than by a hundred rats of his own
species.
Of the present condition of the Noblesse I shall again have occasion to
speak when I come to consider the consequences of the Emancipation.

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Page 324

CHAPTER XXI
LANDED PROPRIETORS OF THE OLD SCHOOL

Russian Hospitality—A Country-House—Its Owner Described—His
Life, Past and Present—Winter Evenings—Books—-Connection with the
Outer World—The Crimean War and the Emancipation—A Drunken,
Dissolute Proprietor—An Old General and his Wife—"Name Days"—A
Legendary Monster—A Retired Judge—A Clever Scribe—Social Leniency
—Cause of Demoralisation.
Of all the foreign countries in which I have travelled, Russia certainly
bears off the palm in the matter of hospitality. Every spring I found myself
in possession of a large number of invitations from landed proprietors in
different parts of the country—far more than I could possibly accept—and a
great part of the summer was generally spent in wandering about from one
country-house to another. I have no intention of asking the reader to
accompany me in all these expeditions—for though pleasant in reality, they
might be tedious in description—but I wish to introduce him to some
typical examples of the landed proprietors. Among them are to be found
nearly all ranks and conditions of men, from the rich magnate, surrounded
with the refined luxury of West-European civilisation, to the poor, ill-clad,
ignorant owner of a few acres which barely supply him with the necessaries
of life. Let us take, first of all, a few specimens from the middle ranks.
In one of the central provinces, near the bank of a sluggish, meandering
stream, stands an irregular group of wooden constructions—old, unpainted,
blackened by time, and surmounted by high, sloping roofs of moss-covered
planks. The principal building is a long, one-storied dwelling-house,
constructed at right angles to the road. At the front of the house is a
spacious, ill-kept yard, and at the back an equally spacious shady garden, in
which art carries on a feeble conflict with encroaching nature. At the other
side of the yard, and facing the front door—or rather the front doors, for
there are two—stand the stables, hay-shed, and granary, and near to that end
of the house which is farthest from the road are two smaller houses, one of
which is the kitchen, and the other the Lyudskaya, or servants' apartments.

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Beyond these we can perceive, through a single row of lime-trees, another
group of time-blackened wooden constructions in a still more dilapidated
condition. That is the farmyard.
There is certainly not much symmetry in the disposition of these
buildings, but there is nevertheless a certain order and meaning in the
apparent chaos. All the buildings which do not require stoves are built at a
considerable distance from the dwelling-house and kitchen, which are more
liable to take fire; and the kitchen stands by itself, because the odour of
cookery where oil is used is by no means agreeable, even for those whose
olfactory nerves are not very sensitive. The plan of the house is likewise not
without a certain meaning. The rigorous separation of the sexes, which
formed a characteristic trait of old Russian society, has long since
disappeared, but its influence may still be traced in houses built on the old
model. The house in question is one of these, and consequently it is
composed of three sections—at the one end the male apartments, at the
other the female apartments, and in the middle the neutral territory,
comprising the dining-room and the salon. This arrangement has its
conveniences, and explains the fact that the house has two front doors. At
the back is a third door, which opens from the neutral territory into a
spacious verandah overlooking the garden.
Here lives, and has lived for many years, Ivan Ivanovitch K——, a
gentleman of the old school, and a very worthy man of his kind. If we look
at him as he sits in his comfortable armchair, with his capacious dressing-
gown hanging loosely about him, we shall be able to read at a glance
something of his character. Nature endowed him with large bones and broad
shoulders, and evidently intended him to be a man of great muscular power,
but he has contrived to frustrate this benevolent intention, and has now
more fat than muscle. His close-cropped head is round as a bullet, and his
features are massive and heavy, but the heaviness is relieved by an
expression of calm contentment and imperturbable good-nature, which
occasionally blossoms into a broad grin. His face is one of those on which
no amount of histrionic talent could produce a look of care and anxiety, and
for this it is not to blame, for such an expression has never been demanded
of it. Like other mortals, he sometimes experiences little annoyances, and
on such occasions his small grey eyes sparkle and his face becomes
suffused with a crimson glow that suggests apoplexy; but ill-fortune has
never been able to get sufficiently firm hold of him to make him understand

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what such words as care and anxiety mean. Of struggle, disappointment,
hope, and all the other feelings which give to human life a dramatic interest,
he knows little by hearsay and nothing by experience. He has, in fact,
always lived outside of that struggle for existence which modern
philosophers declare to be the law of nature.
Somewhere about seventy years ago Ivan Ivan'itch was born in the house
where he still lives. His first lessons he received from the parish priest, and
afterwards he was taught by a deacon's son, who had studied in the
ecclesiastical seminary to so little purpose that he was unable to pass the
final examination. By both of these teachers he was treated with extreme
leniency, and was allowed to learn as little as he chose. His father wished
him to study hard, but his mother was afraid that study might injure his
health, and accordingly gave him several holidays every week. Under these
circumstances his progress was naturally not very rapid, and he was still
very slightly acquainted with the elementary rules of arithmetic, when his
father one day declared that he was already eighteen years of age, and must
at once enter the service.
But what kind of service? Ivan had no natural inclination for any kind of
activity. The project of entering him as a Junker in a cavalry regiment, the
colonel of which was an old friend of the family, did not at all please him.
He had no love for military service, and positively disliked the prospect of
an examination. Whilst seeming, therefore, to bow implicitly to the paternal
authority, he induced his mother to oppose the scheme.
The dilemma in which Ivan found himself was this: in deference to his
father he wished to be in the service and gain that official rank which every
Russian noble desires to possess, and at the same time, in deference to his
mother and his own tastes, he wished to remain at home and continue his
indolent mode of life. The Marshal of the Noblesse, who happened to call
one day, helped him out of the difficulty by offering to inscribe him as
secretary in the Dvoryanskaya Opeka, a bureau which acts as curator for the
estates of minors. All the duties of this office could be fulfilled by a paid
secretary, and the nominal occupant would be periodically promoted as if
he were an active official. This was precisely what Ivan required. He
accepted eagerly the proposal, and obtained, in the course of seven years,
without any effort on his part, the rank of "collegiate secretary,"
corresponding to the "capitaine-en-second" of the military hierarchy. To

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mount higher he would have had to seek some place where he could not
have fulfilled his duty by proxy, so he determined to rest on his laurels, and
sent in his resignation.
Immediately after the termination of his official life his married life
began. Before his resignation had been accepted he suddenly found himself
one morning on the high road to matrimony. Here again there was no effort
on his part. The course of true love, which is said never to run smooth for
ordinary mortals, ran smooth for him. He never had even the trouble of
proposing. The whole affair was arranged by his parents, who chose as
bride for their son the only daughter of their nearest neighbour. The young
lady was only about sixteen years of age, and was not remarkable for
beauty, talent, or any other peculiarity, but she had one very important
qualification—she was the daughter of a man who had an estate contiguous
to their own, and who might give as a dowry a certain bit of land which
they had long desired to add to their own property. The negotiations, being
of a delicate nature, were entrusted to an old lady who had a great
reputation for diplomatic skill in such matters, and she accomplished her
mission with such success that in the course of a few weeks the
preliminaries were arranged and the day fixed for the wedding. Thus Ivan
Ivan'itch won his bride as easily as he had won his tchin of "collegiate
secretary."
Though the bridegroom had received rather than taken to himself a wife,
and did not imagine for a moment that he was in love, he had no reason to
regret the choice that was made for him. Maria Petrovna was exactly suited
by character and education to be the wife of a man like Ivan Ivan'itch. She
had grown up at home in the society of nurses and servant-maids, and had
never learned anything more than could be obtained from the parish priest
and from "Ma'mselle," a personage occupying a position midway between a
servant-maid and a governess. The first events of her life were the
announcement that she was to be married and the preparations for the
wedding. She still remembers the delight which the purchase of her
trousseau afforded her, and keeps in her memory a full catalogue of the
articles bought. The first years of her married life were not very happy, for
she was treated by her mother-in-law as a naughty child who required to be
frequently snubbed and lectured; but she bore the discipline with exemplary
patience, and in due time became her own mistress and autocratic ruler in
all domestic affairs. From that time she has lived an active, uneventful life.

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Between her and her husband there is as much mutual attachment as can
reasonably be expected in phlegmatic natures after half a century of
matrimony. She has always devoted her energies to satisfying his simple
material wants—of intellectual wants he has none—and securing his
comfort in every possible way. Under this fostering care he "effeminated
himself" (obabilsya), as he is wont to say. His love of shooting died out, he
cared less and less to visit his neighbours, and each successive year he spent
more and more time in his comfortable arm-chair.
The daily life of this worthy couple is singularly regular and
monotonous, varying only with the changing seasons. In summer Ivan
Ivan'itch gets up about seven o'clock, and puts on, with the assistance of his
valet de chambre, a simple costume, consisting chiefly of a faded,
plentifully stained dressing-gown. Having nothing particular to do, he sits
down at the open window and looks into the yard. As the servants pass he
stops and questions them, and then gives them orders, or scolds them, as
circumstances demand. Towards nine o'clock tea is announced, and he goes
into the dining-room—a long, narrow apartment with bare wooden floor
and no furniture but a table and chairs, all in a more or less rickety
condition. Here he finds his wife with the tea-urn before her. In a few
minutes the grandchildren come in, kiss their grandpapa's hand, and take
their places round the table. As this morning meal consists merely of bread
and tea, it does not last long; and all disperse to their several occupations.
The head of the house begins the labours of the day by resuming his seat at
the open window. When he has smoked some cigarettes and indulged in a
proportionate amount of silent contemplation, he goes out with the intention
of visiting the stables and farmyard, but generally before he has crossed the
court he finds the heat unbearable, and returns to his former position by the
open window. Here he sits tranquilly till the sun has so far moved round
that the verandah at the back of the house is completely in the shade, when
he has his arm-chair removed thither, and sits there till dinner-time.
Maria Petrovna spends her morning in a more active way. As soon as the
breakfast table has been cleared she goes to the larder, takes stock of the
provisions, arranges the menu du jour, and gives to the cook the necessary
materials, with detailed instructions as to how they are to be prepared. The
rest of the morning she devotes to her other household duties.

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Towards one o'clock dinner is announced, and Ivan Ivan'itch prepares his
appetite by swallowing at a gulp a wineglassful of home-made bitters.
Dinner is the great event of the day. The food is abundant and of good
quality, but mushrooms, onions, and fat play a rather too important part in
the repast, and the whole is prepared with very little attention to the
recognised principles of culinary hygiene. Many of the dishes, indeed,
would make a British valetudinarian stand aghast, but they seem to produce
no bad effect on those Russian organisms which have never been weakened
by town life, nervous excitement, or intellectual exertion.
No sooner has the last dish been removed than a deathlike stillness falls
upon the house: it is the time of the after-dinner siesta. The young folks go
into the garden, and all the other members of the household give way to the
drowsiness naturally engendered by a heavy meal on a hot summer day.
Ivan Ivan'itch retires to his own room, from which the flies have been
carefully expelled. Maria Petrovna dozes in an arm-chair in the sitting-
room, with a pocket-handkerchief spread over her face. The servants snore
in the corridors, the garret, or the hay-shed; and even the old watch-dog in
the corner of the yard stretches himself out at full length on the shady side
of his kennel.
In about two hours the house gradually re-awakens. Doors begin to
creak; the names of various servants are bawled out in all tones, from bass
to falsetto; and footsteps are heard in the yard. Soon a man-servant issues
from the kitchen bearing an enormous tea-urn, which puffs like a little
steam-engine. The family assembles for tea. In Russia, as elsewhere, sleep
after a heavy meal produces thirst, so that the tea and other beverages are
very acceptable. Then some little delicacies are served—such as fruit and
wild berries, or cucumbers with honey, or something else of the kind, and
the family again disperses. Ivan Ivan'itch takes a turn in the fields on his
begovuiya droshki—an extremely light vehicle composed of two pairs of
wheels joined together by a single board, on which the driver sits stride-
legged; and Maria Petrovna probably receives a visit from the Popadya (the
priest's wife), who is the chief gossipmonger of the neighbourhood. There is
not much scandal in the district, but what little there is the Popadya
carefully collects, and distributes among her acquaintances with
undiscriminating generosity.

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In the evening it often happens that a little group of peasants come into
the court, and ask to see the "master." The master goes to the door, and
generally finds that they have some favour to request. In reply to his
question, "Well, children, what do you want?" they tell their story in a
confused, rambling way, several of them speaking at a time, and he has to
question and cross-question them before he comes to understand clearly
what they desire. If he tells them he cannot grant it, they probably do not
accept a first refusal, but endeavour by means of supplication to make him
reconsider his decision. Stepping forward a little, and bowing low, one of
the group begins in a half-respectful, half-familiar, caressing tone: "Little
Father, Ivan Ivan'itch, be gracious; you are our father, and we are your
children"—and so on. Ivan Ivan'itch good-naturedly listens, and again
explains that he cannot grant what they ask; but they have still hopes of
gaining their point by entreaty, and continue their supplications till at last
his patience is exhausted and he says to them in a paternal tone, "Now,
enough! enough! you are blockheads—blockheads all round! There's no use
talking; it can't be done." And with these words he enters the house, so as to
prevent all further discussion.
A regular part of the evening's occupation is the interview with the
steward. The work that has just been done, and the programme for the
morrow, are always discussed at great length; and much time is spent in
speculating as to the weather during the next few days. On this latter point
the calendar is always carefully consulted, and great confidence is placed in
its predictions, though past experience has often shown that they are not to
be implicitly trusted. The conversation drags on till supper is announced,
and immediately after that meal, which is an abridged repetition of dinner,
all retire for the night.
Thus pass the days and weeks and months in the house of Ivan Ivan'itch,
and rarely is there any deviation from the ordinary programme. The climate
necessitates, of course, some slight modifications. When it is cold, the doors
and windows have to be kept shut, and after heavy rains those who do not
like to wade in mud have to remain in the house or garden. In the long
winter evenings the family assembles in the sitting-room, and all kill time
as best they can. Ivan Ivan'itch smokes and meditates or listens to the
barrel-organ played by one of the children. Maria Petrovna knits a stocking.
The old aunt, who commonly spends the winter with them, plays Patience,
and sometimes draws from the game conclusions as to the future. Her

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favourite predictions are that a stranger will arrive, or that a marriage will
take place, and she can determine the sex of the stranger and the colour of
the bridegroom's hair; but beyond this her art does not go, and she cannot
satisfy the young ladies' curiosity as to further details.
Books and newspapers are rarely seen in the sitting-room, but for those
who wish to read there is a book-case full of miscellaneous literature, which
gives some idea of the literary tastes of the family during several
generations. The oldest volumes were bought by Ivan Ivan'itch's
grandfather—a man who, according to the family traditions, enjoyed the
confidence of the great Catherine. Though wholly overlooked by recent
historians, he was evidently a man who had some pretensions to culture. He
had his portrait painted by a foreign artist of considerable talent—it still
hangs in the sitting-room—and he bought several pieces of Sevres ware, the
last of which stands on a commode in the corner and contrasts strangely
with the rude home-made furniture and squalid appearance of the
apartment. Among the books which bear his name are the tragedies of
Sumarokof, who imagined himself to be "the Russian Voltaire"; the
amusing comedies of Von-Wisin, some of which still keep the stage; the
loud-sounding odes of the courtly Derzhavin; two or three books containing
the mystic wisdom of Freemasonry as interpreted by Schwarz and
Novikoff; Russian translations of Richardson's "Pamela," "Sir Charles
Grandison," and "Clarissa Harlowe"; Rousseau's "Nouvelle Heloise," in
Russian garb; and three or four volumes of Voltaire in the original. Among
the works collected at a somewhat later period are translations of Ann
Radcliffe, of Scott's early novels, and of Ducray Dumenil, whose stories,
"Lolotte et Fanfan" and "Victor," once enjoyed a great reputation. At this
point the literary tastes of the family appear to have died out, for the
succeeding literature is represented exclusively by Kryloff's Fables, a
farmer's manual, a handbook of family medicine, and a series of calendars.
There are, however, some signs of a revival, for on the lowest shelf stand
recent editions of Pushkin, Lermontof, and Gogol, and a few works by
living authors.
Sometimes the monotony of the winter is broken by visiting neighbours
and receiving visitors in return, or in a more decided way by a visit of a few
days to the capital of the province. In the latter case Maria Petrovna spends
nearly all her time in shopping, and brings home a large collection of
miscellaneous articles. The inspection of these by the assembled family

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forms an important domestic event, which completely throws into the shade
the occasional visits of peddlers and colporteurs. Then there are the
festivities at Christmas and Easter, and occasionally little incidents of less
agreeable kind. It may be that there is a heavy fall of snow, so that it is
necessary to cut roads to the kitchen and stables; or wolves enter the
courtyard at night and have a fight with the watch-dogs; or the news is
brought that a peasant who had been drinking in a neighbouring village has
been found frozen to death on the road.
Altogether the family live a very isolated life, but they have one bond of
connection with the great outer world. Two of the sons are officers in the
army and both of them write home occasionally to their mother and sisters.
To these two youths is devoted all the little stock of sentimentality which
Maria Petrovna possesses. She can talk of them by the hour to any one who
will listen to her, and has related to the Popadya a hundred times every
trivial incident of their lives. Though they have never given her much cause
for anxiety, and they are now men of middle age, she lives in constant fear
that some evil may befall them. What she most fears is that they may be
sent on a campaign or may fall in love with actresses. War and actresses are,
in fact, the two bug-bears of her existence, and whenever she has a
disquieting dream she asks the priest to offer up a moleben for the safety of
her absent ones. Sometimes she ventures to express her anxiety to her
husband, and recommends him to write to them; but he considers writing a
letter a very serious bit of work, and always replies evasively, "Well, well,
we must think about it."
During the Crimean War Ivan Ivan'itch half awoke from his habitual
lethargy, and read occasionally the meagre official reports published by the
Government. He was a little surprised that no great victories were reported,
and that the army did not at once advance on Constantinople. As to causes
he never speculated. Some of his neighbours told him that the army was
disorganised, and the whole system of Nicholas had been proved to be
utterly worthless. That might all be very true, but he did not understand
military and political matters. No doubt it would all come right in the end.
All did come right, after a fashion, and he again gave up reading
newspapers; but ere long he was startled by reports much more alarming
than any rumours of war. People began to talk about the peasant question,
and to say openly that the serfs must soon be emancipated. For once in his
life Ivan Ivan'itch asked explanations. Finding one of his neighbours, who

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had always been a respectable, sensible man, and a severe disciplinarian,
talking in this way, he took him aside and asked what it all meant. The
neighbour explained that the old order of things had shown itself bankrupt
and was doomed, that a new epoch was opening, that everything was to be
reformed, and that the Emperor, in accordance with a secret clause of the
Treaty with the Allies, was about to grant a Constitution! Ivan Ivan'itch
listened for a little in silence, and then, with a gesture of impatience,
interrupted the speaker: "Polno duratchitsya! enough of fun and tomfoolery.
Vassili Petrovitch, tell me seriously what you mean."
When Vassili Petrovitch vowed that he spoke in all seriousness, his friend
gazed at him with a look of intense compassion, and remarked, as he turned
away, "So you, too, have gone out of your mind!"
The utterances of Vassili Petrovitch, which his lethargic, sober-minded
friend regarded as indicating temporary insanity in the speaker, represented
fairly the mental condition of very many Russian nobles at that time, and
were not without a certain foundation. The idea about a secret clause in the
Treaty of Paris was purely imaginary, but it was quite true that the country
was entering on an epoch of great reforms, among which the Emancipation
question occupied the chief place. Of this even the sceptical Ivan Ivan'itch
was soon convinced. The Emperor formally declared to the Noblesse of the
province of Moscow that the actual state of things could not continue
forever, and called on the landed proprietors to consider by what means the
condition of their serfs might be ameliorated. Provincial committees were
formed for the purpose of preparing definite projects, and gradually it
became apparent that the emancipation of the serfs was really at hand.
Ivan Ivan'itch was alarmed at the prospect of losing his authority over his
serfs. Though he had never been a cruel taskmaster, he had not spared the
rod when he considered it necessary, and he believed birch twigs to be a
necessary instrument in the Russian system of agriculture. For some time he
drew consolation from the thought that peasants were not birds of the air,
that they must under all circumstances require food and clothing, and that
they would be ready to serve him as agricultural labourers; but when he
learned that they were to receive a large part of the estate for their own use,
his hopes fell, and he greatly feared that he would be inevitably ruined.
These dark forebodings have not been by any means realised. His serfs
were emancipated and received about a half of the estate, but in return for

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the land ceded they paid him annually a considerable sum, and they were
always ready to cultivate his fields for a fair remuneration. The yearly
outlay was considerably greater, but the price of grain rose, and this
counterbalanced the additional yearly expenditure. The administration of
the estate has become much less patriarchal; much that was formerly left to
custom and tacit understanding is now regulated by express agreement on
purely commercial principles; a great deal more money is paid out and a
great deal more received; there is much less authority in the hands of the
master, and his responsibilities are proportionately diminished; but in spite
of all these changes, Ivan Ivan'itch would have great difficulty in deciding
whether he is a richer or a poorer man. He has fewer horses and fewer
servants, but he has still more than he requires, and his mode of life has
undergone no perceptible alteration. Maria Petrovna complains that she is
no longer supplied with eggs, chickens, and homespun linen by the
peasants, and that everything is three times as dear as it used to be; but
somehow the larder is still full, and abundance reigns in the house as of old.
Ivan Ivan'itch certainly does not possess transcendent qualities of any
kind. It would be impossible to make a hero out of him, even though his
own son should be his biographer. Muscular Christians may reasonably
despise him, an active, energetic man may fairly condemn him for his
indolence and apathy. But, on the other hand, he has no very bad qualities.
His vices are of the passive, negative kind. He is a respectable if not a
distinguished member of society, and appears a very worthy man when
compared with many of his neighbours who have been brought up in
similar conditions. Take, for instance, his younger brother Dimitri, who
lives a short way off.
Dimitri Ivanovitch, like his brother Ivan, had been endowed by nature
with a very decided repugnance to prolonged intellectual exertion, but as he
was a man of good parts he did not fear a Junker's examination—especially
when he could count on the colonel's protection—and accordingly entered
the army. In his regiment were a number of jovial young officers like
himself, always ready to relieve the monotony of garrison life by boisterous
dissipation, and among these he easily acquired the reputation of being a
thoroughly good fellow. In drinking bouts he could hold his own with the
best of them, and in all mad pranks invariably played the chief part. By this
means he endeared himself to his comrades, and for a time all went well.
The colonel had himself sown wild oats plentifully in his youth, and was

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quite disposed to overlook, as far as possible, the bacchanalian peccadilloes
of his subordinates. But before many years had passed, the regiment
suddenly changed its character. Certain rumours had reached headquarters,
and the Emperor Nicholas appointed as colonel a stern disciplinarian of
German origin, who aimed at making the regiment a kind of machine that
should work with the accuracy of a chronometer.
This change did not at all suit the tastes of Dimitri Ivan'itch. He chafed
under the new restraints, and as soon as he had gained the rank of lieutenant
retired from the service to enjoy the freedom of country life. Shortly
afterwards his father died, and he thereby became owner of an estate, with
two hundred serfs. He did not, like his elder brother, marry, and "effeminate
himself," but he did worse. In his little independent kingdom—for such was
practically a Russian estate in the good old times—he was lord of all he
surveyed, and gave full scope to his boisterous humour, his passion for
sport, and his love of drinking and dissipation. Many of the mad pranks in
which he indulged will long be preserved by popular tradition, but they
cannot well be related here.
Dimitri Ivan'itch is now a man long past middle age, and still continues
his wild, dissipated life. His house resembles an ill-kept, disreputable
tavern. The floor is filthy, the furniture chipped and broken, the servants
indolent, slovenly, and in rags. Dogs of all breeds and sizes roam about the
rooms and corridors. The master, when not asleep, is always in a more or
less complete state of intoxication. Generally he has one or two guests
staying with him—men of the same type as himself—and days and nights
are spent in drinking and card-playing. When he cannot have his usual
boon-companions he sends for one or two small proprietors who live near—
men who are legally nobles, but who are so poor that they differ little from
peasants. Formerly, when ordinary resources failed, he occasionally had
recourse to the violent expedient of ordering his servants to stop the first
passing travellers, whoever they might be, and bring them in by persuasion
or force, as circumstances might demand. If the travellers refused to accept
such rough, undesired hospitality, a wheel would be taken off their
tarantass, or some indispensable part of the harness would be secreted, and
they might consider themselves fortunate if they succeeded in getting away
next morning.*

* This custom has fortunately gone out of fashion even in

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outlying districts, but an incident of the kind happened to
a friend of mine as late as 1871. He was detained against
his will for two whole days by a man whom he had never seen
before, and at last effected his escape by bribing the
servants of his tyrannical host.

In the time of serfage the domestic serfs had much to bear from their
capricious, violent master. They lived in an atmosphere of abusive
language, and were subjected not unfrequently to corporal punishment.
Worse than this, their master was constantly threatening to "shave their
forehead"—that is to say, to give them as recruits—and occasionally he put
his threat into execution, in spite of the wailings and entreaties of the culprit
and his relations. And yet, strange to say, nearly all of them remained with
him as free servants after the Emancipation.
In justice to the Russian landed proprietors, I must say that the class
represented by Dimitri Ivan'itch has now almost disappeared. It was the
natural result of serfage and social stagnation—of a state of society in
which there were few legal and moral restraints, and few inducements to
honourable activity.
Among the other landed proprietors of the district, one of the best known
is Nicolai Petrovitch B——, an old military man with the rank of general.
Like Ivan Ivan'itch, he belongs to the old school; but the two men must be
contrasted rather than compared. The difference in their lives and characters
is reflected in their outward appearance. Ivan Ivan'itch, as we know, is
portly in form and heavy in all his movements, and loves to loll in his arm-
chair or to loaf about the house in a capacious dressing-gown. The General,
on the contrary, is thin, wiry, and muscular, wears habitually a close-
buttoned military tunic, and always has a stern expression, the force of
which is considerably augmented by a bristly moustache resembling a shoe-
brush. As he paces up and down the room, knitting his brows and gazing at
the floor, he looks as if he were forming combinations of the first
magnitude; but those who know him well are aware that this is an optical
delusion, of which he is himself to some extent a victim. He is quite
innocent of deep thought and concentrated intellectual effort. Though he
frowns so fiercely he is by no means of a naturally ferocious temperament.
Had he passed all his life in the country he would probably have been as
good-natured and phlegmatic as Ivan Ivan'itch himself, but, unlike that
worshipper of tranquillity, he had aspired to rise in the service, and had
adopted the stern, formal bearing which the Emperor Nicholas considered

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indispensable in an officer. The manner which he had at first put on as part
of his uniform became by the force of habit almost a part of his nature, and
at the age of thirty he was a stern disciplinarian and uncompromising
formalist, who confined his attention exclusively to drill and other military
duties. Thus he rose steadily by his own merit, and reached the goal of his
early ambition—the rank of general.
As soon as this point was reached he determined to leave the service and
retire to his property. Many considerations urged him to take this step. He
enjoyed the title of Excellency which he had long coveted, and when he put
on his full uniform his breast was bespangled with medals and decorations.
Since the death of his father the revenues of his estate had been steadily
decreasing, and report said that the best wood in his forest was rapidly
disappearing. His wife had no love for the country, and would have
preferred to settle in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but they found that with
their small income they could not live in a large town in a style suitable to
their rank.
The General determined to introduce order into his estate, and become a
practical farmer; but a little experience convinced him that his new
functions were much more difficult than the commanding of a regiment. He
has long since given over the practical management of the property to a
steward, and he contents himself with exercising what he imagines to be an
efficient control. Though he wishes to do much, he finds small scope for his
activity, and spends his days in pretty much the same way as Ivan Ivan'itch,
with this difference, that he plays cards whenever he gets an opportunity,
and reads regularly the Moscow Gazette and Russki Invalid, the official
military paper. What specially interests him is the list of promotions,
retirements, and Imperial rewards for merit and seniority. When he sees the
announcement that some old comrade has been made an officer of his
Majesty's suite or has received a grand cordon, he frowns a little more than
usual, and is tempted to regret that he retired from the service. Had he
waited patiently, perhaps a bit of good fortune might have fallen likewise to
his lot. This idea takes possession of him, and during the remainder of the
day he is taciturn and morose. His wife notices the change, and knows the
reason of it, but has too much good sense and tact to make any allusion to
the subject.

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Anna Alexandrovna—as the good lady is called—is an elderly dame who
does not at all resemble the wife of Ivan Ivan'itch. She was long
accustomed to a numerous military society, with dinner-parties, dancing,
promenades, card-playing, and all the other amusements of garrison life,
and she never contracted a taste for domestic concerns. Her knowledge of
culinary affairs is extremely vague, and she has no idea of how to make
preserves, nalivka, and other home-made delicacies, though Maria
Petrovna, who is universally acknowledged to be a great adept in such
matters, has proposed a hundred times to give her some choice recipes. In
short, domestic affairs are a burden to her, and she entrusts them as far as
possible to the housekeeper. Altogether she finds country life very tiresome,
but, possessing that placid, philosophical temperament which seems to have
some casual connection with corpulence, she submits without murmuring,
and tries to lighten a little the unavoidable monotony by paying visits and
receiving visitors. The neighbours within a radius of twenty miles are, with
few exceptions, more or less of the Ivan Ivan'itch and Maria Petrovna type
—decidedly rustic in their manners and conceptions; but their company is
better than absolute solitude, and they have at least the good quality of
being always able and willing to play cards for any number of hours.
Besides this, Anna Alexandrovna has the satisfaction of feeling that
amongst them she is almost a great personage, and unquestionably an
authority in all matters of taste and fashion; and she feels specially well
disposed towards those of them who frequently address her as "Your
Excellency."
The chief festivities take place on the "name-days" of the General and his
spouse—that is to say, the days sacred to St. Nicholas and St. Anna. On
these occasions all the neighbours come to offer their congratulations, and
remain to dinner as a matter of course. After dinner the older visitors sit
down to cards, and the young people extemporise a dance. The fete is
specially successful when the eldest son comes home to take part in it, and
brings a brother officer with him. He is now a general like his father.* In
days gone by one of his comrades was expected to offer his hand to Olga
Nekola'vna, the second daughter, a delicate young lady who had been
educated in one of the great Instituts—gigantic boarding-schools, founded
and kept up by the Government, for the daughters of those who are
supposed to have deserved well of their country. Unfortunately the expected
offer was never made, and she and her sister live at home as old maids,

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bewailing the absence of "civilised" society, and killing time in a harmless,
elegant way by means of music, needlework, and light literature.

* Generals are much more common in Russia than in other
countries. A few years ago there was an old lady in Moscow
who had a family of ten sons, all of whom were generals!
The rank may be obtained in the civil as well as the
military service.

At these "name-day" gatherings one used to meet still more interesting
specimens of the old school. One of them I remember particularly. He was a
tall, corpulent old man, in a threadbare frock-coat, which wrinkled up about
his waist. His shaggy eyebrows almost covered his small, dull eyes, his
heavy moustache partially concealed a large mouth strongly indicating
sensuous tendencies. His hair was cut so short that it was difficult to say
what its colour would be if it were allowed to grow. He always arrived in
his tarantass just in time for the zakuska—the appetising collation that is
served shortly before dinner—grunted out a few congratulations to the host
and hostess and monosyllabic greetings to his acquaintances, ate a copious
meal, and immediately afterwards placed himself at a card-table, where he
sat in silence as long as he could get any one to play with him. People did
not like, however, to play with Andrei Vassil'itch, for his society was not
agreeable, and he always contrived to go home with a well-filled purse.
Andrei Vassil'itch was a noted man in the neighbourhood. He was the
centre of a whole cycle of legends, and I have often heard that his name was
used with effect by nurses to frighten naughty children. I never missed an
opportunity of meeting him, for I was curious to see and study a legendary
monster in the flesh. How far the numerous stories told about him were true
I cannot pretend to say, but they were certainly not without foundation. In
his youth he had served for some time in the army, and was celebrated, even
in an age when martinets had always a good chance of promotion, for his
brutality to his subordinates. His career was cut short, however, when he
had only the rank of captain. Having compromised himself in some way, he
found it advisable to send in his resignation and retire to his estate. Here he
organised his house on Mahometan rather than Christian principles, and
ruled his servants and peasants as he had been accustomed to rule his
soldiers—using corporal punishment in merciless fashion. His wife did not
venture to protest against the Mahometan arrangements, and any peasant
who stood in the way of their realisation was at once given as a recruit, or

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transported to Siberia, in accordance with his master's demand.* At last his
tyranny and extortion drove his serfs to revolt. One night his house was
surrounded and set on fire, but he contrived to escape the fate that was
prepared for him, and caused all who had taken part in the revolt to be
mercilessly punished. This was a severe lesson, but it had no effect upon
him. Taking precautions against a similar surprise, he continued to tyrannise
and extort as before, until in 1861 the serfs were emancipated, and his
authority came to an end.

* When a proprietor considered any of his serfs unruly he
could, according to law, have them transported to Siberia
without trial, on condition of paying the expenses of
transport. Arrived at their destination, they received
land, and lived as free colonists, with the single
restriction that they were not allowed to leave the locality
where they settled.

A very different sort of man was Pavel Trophim'itch, who likewise came
regularly to pay his respects and present his congratulations to the General
and "Gheneralsha."* It was pleasant to turn from the hard, wrinkled, morose
features of the legendary monster to the soft, smooth, jovial face of this
man, who had been accustomed to look at the bright side of things, till his
face had caught something of their brightness. "A good, jovial, honest
face!" a stranger might exclaim as he looked at him. Knowing something of
his character and history, I could not endorse such an opinion. Jovial he
certainly was, for few men were more capable of making and enjoying
mirth. Good he might be also called, if the word were taken in the sense of
good-natured, for he never took offence, and was always ready to do a
kindly action if it did not cost him any trouble. But as to his honesty, that
required some qualification. Wholly untarnished his reputation certainly
could not be, for he had been a judge in the District Court before the time of
the judicial reforms; and, not being a Cato, he had succumbed to the usual
temptations. He had never studied law, and made no pretensions to the
possession of great legal knowledge. To all who would listen to him he
declared openly that he knew much more about pointers and setters than
about legal formalities. But his estate was very small, and he could not
afford to give up his appointment.

* The female form of the word General.

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Of these unreformed Courts, which are happily among the things of the
past, I shall have occasion to speak in the sequel. For the present I wish
merely to say that they were thoroughly corrupt, and I hasten to add that
Pavel Trophim'itch was by no means a judge of the worst kind. He had been
known to protect widows and orphans against those who wished to despoil
them, and no amount of money would induce him to give an unjust decision
against a friend who had privately explained the case to him; but when he
knew nothing of the case or of the parties he readily signed the decision
prepared by the secretary, and quietly pocketed the proceeds, without
feeling any very disagreeable twinges of conscience. All judges, he knew,
did likewise, and he had no pretension to being better than his fellows.
When Pavel Trophim'itch played cards at the General's house or
elsewhere, a small, awkward, clean-shaven man, with dark eyes and a
Tartar cast of countenance, might generally be seen sitting at the same table.
His name was Alexei Petrovitch T——. Whether he really had any Tartar
blood in him it is impossible to say, but certainly his ancestors for one or
two generations were all good orthodox Christians. His father had been a
poor military surgeon in a marching regiment, and he himself had become
at an early age a scribe in one of the bureaux of the district town. He was
then very poor, and had great difficulty in supporting life on the miserable
pittance which he received as a salary; but he was a sharp, clever youth, and
soon discovered that even a scribe had a great many opportunities of
extorting money from the ignorant public.
These opportunities Alexei Petrovitch used with great ability, and became
known as one of the most accomplished bribe-takers (vzyatotchniki) in the
district. His position, however, was so very subordinate that he would never
have become rich had he not fallen upon a very ingenious expedient which
completely succeeded. Hearing that a small proprietor, who had an only
daughter, had come to live in the town for a few weeks, he took a room in
the inn where the newcomers lived, and when he had made their
acquaintance he fell dangerously ill. Feeling his last hours approaching, he
sent for a priest, confided to him that he had amassed a large fortune, and
requested that a will should be drawn up. In the will he bequeathed large
sums to all his relations, and a considerable sum to the parish church. The
whole affair was to be kept a secret till after his death, but his neighbour—
the old gentleman with the daughter—was called in to act as a witness.
When all this had been done he did not die, but rapidly recovered, and now

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induced the old gentleman to whom he had confided his secret to grant him
his daughter's hand. The daughter had no objections to marry a man
possessed of such wealth, and the marriage was duly celebrated. Shortly
after this the father died—without discovering, it is to be hoped, the hoax
that had been perpetrated—and Alexei Petrovitch became virtual possessor
of a very comfortable little estate. With the change in his fortunes he
completely changed his principles, or at least his practice. In all his dealings
he was strictly honest. He lent money, it is true, at from ten to fifteen per
cent., but that was considered in these parts not a very exorbitant rate of
interest, nor was he unnecessarily hard upon his debtors.
It may seem strange that an honourable man like the General should
receive in his house such a motley company, comprising men of decidedly
tarnished reputation; but in this respect he was not at all peculiar. One
constantly meets in Russian society persons who are known to have been
guilty of flagrant dishonesty, and we find that men who are themselves
honourable enough associate with them on friendly terms. This social
leniency, moral laxity, or whatever else it may be called, is the result of
various causes. Several concurrent influences have tended to lower the
moral standard of the Noblesse. Formerly, when the noble lived on his
estate, he could play with impunity the petty tyrant, and could freely
indulge his legitimate and illegitimate caprices without any legal or moral
restraint. I do not at all mean to assert that all proprietors abused their
authority, but I venture to say that no class of men can long possess such
enormous arbitrary power over those around them without being thereby
more or less demoralised. When the noble entered the service he had not the
same immunity from restraint—on the contrary, his position resembled
rather that of the serf—but he breathed an atmosphere of peculation and
jobbery, little conducive to moral purity and uprightness. If an official had
refused to associate with those who were tainted with the prevailing vices,
he would have found himself completely isolated, and would have been
ridiculed as a modern Don Quixote. Add to this that all classes of the
Russian people have a certain kindly, apathetic good-nature which makes
them very charitable towards their neighbours, and that they do not always
distinguish between forgiving private injury and excusing public
delinquencies. If we bear all this in mind, we may readily understand that in
the time of serfage and maladministration a man could be guilty of very
reprehensible practises without incurring social excommunication.

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During the period of moral awakening, after the Crimean War and the
death of Nicholas I., society revelled in virtuous indignation against the
prevailing abuses, and placed on the pillory the most prominent
delinquents; but the intensity of the moral feeling has declined, and
something of the old apathy has returned. This might have been predicted
by any one well acquainted with the character and past history of the
Russian people. Russia advances on the road of progress, not in that
smooth, gradual, prosaic way to which we are accustomed, but by a series
of unconnected, frantic efforts, each of which is naturally followed by a
period of temporary exhaustion.

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CHAPTER XXII
PROPRIETORS OF THE MODERN SCHOOL

A Russian Petit Maitre—His House and Surroundings—Abortive
Attempts to Improve Agriculture and the Condition of the Serfs—A
Comparison—A "Liberal" Tchinovnik—His Idea of Progress—A Justice of
the Peace—His Opinion of Russian Literature, Tchinovniks, and Petits
Maitres—His Supposed and Real Character—An Extreme Radical—
Disorders in the Universities—Administrative Procedure—Russia's
Capacity for Accomplishing Political and Social Evolutions—A Court
Dignitary in his Country House.
Hitherto I have presented to the reader old-fashioned types which were
common enough thirty years ago, when I first resided in Russia, but which
are rapidly disappearing. Let me now present a few of the modern school.
In the same district as Ivan Ivan'itch and the General lives Victor
Alexandr'itch L——. As we approach his house we can at once perceive
that he differs from the majority of his neighbours. The gate is painted and
moves easily on its hinges, the fence is in good repair, the short avenue
leading up to the front door is well kept, and in the garden we can perceive
at a glance that more attention is paid to flowers than to vegetables. The
house is of wood, and not large, but it has some architectural pretensions in
the form of a great, pseudo-Doric wooden portico that covers three-fourths
of the façade. In the interior we remark everywhere the influence of
Western civilisation. Victor Alexandr'itch is by no means richer than Ivan
Ivan'itch, but his rooms are much more luxuriously furnished. The furniture
is of a lighter model, more comfortable, and in a much better state of
preservation. Instead of the bare, scantily furnished sitting-room, with the
old-fashioned barrel-organ which played only six airs, we find an elegant
drawing-room, with a piano by one of the most approved makers, and
numerous articles of foreign manufacture, comprising a small buhl table
and two bits of genuine old Wedgwood. The servants are clean, and dressed
in European costume. The master, too, is very different in appearance. He
pays great attention to his toilette, wearing a dressing-gown only in the

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early morning, and a fashionable lounging coat during the rest of the day.
The Turkish pipes which his grandfather loved he holds in abhorrence, and
habitually smokes cigarettes. With his wife and daughters he always speaks
French, and calls them by French or English names.
But the part of the house which most strikingly illustrates the difference
between old and new is "le cabinet de monsieur." In the cabinet of Ivan
Ivan'itch the furniture consists of a broad sofa which serves as a bed, a few
deal chairs, and a clumsy deal table, on which are generally to be found a
bundle of greasy papers, an old chipped ink-bottle, a pen, and a calendar.
The cabinet of Victor Alexandr'itch has an entirely different appearance. It
is small, but at once comfortable and elegant. The principal objects which it
contains are a library-table, with ink-stand, presse-papier, paper-knives, and
other articles in keeping, and in the opposite corner a large bookcase. The
collection of books is remarkable, not from the number of volumes or the
presence of rare editions, but from the variety of the subjects. History, art,
fiction, the drama, political economy, and agriculture are represented in
about equal proportions. Some of the works are in Russian, others in
German, a large number in French, and a few in Italian. The collection
illustrates the former life and present occupations of the owner.
The father of Victor Alexandr'itch was a landed proprietor who had made
a successful career in the civil service, and desired that his son should
follow the same profession. For this purpose Victor was first carefully
trained at home, and then sent to the University of Moscow, where he spent
four years as a student of law. From the University he passed to the
Ministry of the Interior in St. Petersburg, but he found the monotonous
routine of official life not at all suited to his taste, and very soon sent in his
resignation. The death of his father had made him proprietor of an estate,
and thither he retired, hoping to find there plenty of occupation more
congenial than the writing of official papers.
At the University of Moscow he had attended lectures on history and
philosophy, and had got through a large amount of desultory reading. The
chief result of his studies was the acquisition of many ill-digested general
principles, and certain vague, generous, humanitarian aspirations. With this
intellectual capital he hoped to lead a useful life in the country. When he
had repaired and furnished the house he set himself to improve the estate. In
the course of his promiscuous reading he had stumbled on some

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descriptions of English and Tuscan agriculture, and had there learned what
wonders might be effected by a rational system of farming. Why should not
Russia follow the example of England and Tuscany? By proper drainage,
plentiful manure, good ploughs, and the cultivation of artificial grasses, the
production might be multiplied tenfold; and by the introduction of
agricultural machines the manual labour might be greatly diminished. All
this seemed as simple as a sum in arithmetic, and Victor Alexandr'itch,
more scholarum rei familiaris ignarus, without a moment's hesitation
expended his ready money in procuring from England a threshing-machine,
ploughs, harrows, and other implements of the newest model.
The arrival of these was an event that was long remembered. The
peasants examined them with attention, not unmixed with wonder, but said
nothing. When the master explained to them the advantages of the new
instruments, they still remained silent. Only one old man, gazing at the
threshing-machine, remarked, in an audible "aside," "A cunning people,
these Germans!"* On being asked for their opinion, they replied vaguely,
"How should we know? It OUGHT to be so." But when their master had
retired, and was explaining to his wife and the French governess that the
chief obstacle to progress in Russia was the apathetic indolence and
conservative spirit of the peasantry, they expressed their opinions more
freely. "These may be all very well for the Germans, but they won't do for
us. How are our little horses to drag these big ploughs? And as for that [the
threshing-machine], it's of no use." Further examination and reflection
confirmed this first impression, and it was unanimously decided that no
good would come of the new-fangled inventions.

* The Russian peasant comprehends all the inhabitants of
Western Europe under the term Nyemtsi, which in the language
of the educated designates only Germans. The rest of
humanity is composed of Pravoslavniye (Greek Orthodox),
Busurmanye (Mahometans), and Poliacki (Poles).

These apprehensions proved to be only too well founded. The ploughs
were much too heavy for the peasants' small horses, and the threshing-
machine broke down at the first attempt to use it. For the purchase of lighter
implements or stronger horses there was no ready money, and for the
repairing of the threshing-machine there was not an engineer within a radius
of a hundred and fifty miles. The experiment was, in short, a complete
failure, and the new purchases were put away out of sight.

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For some weeks after this incident Victor Alexandr'itch felt very
despondent, and spoke more than usual about the apathy and stupidity of
the peasantry. His faith in infallible science was somewhat shaken, and his
benevolent aspirations were for a time laid aside. But this eclipse of faith
was not of long duration. Gradually he recovered his normal condition, and
began to form new schemes. From the study of certain works on political
economy he learned that the system of communal property was ruinous to
the fertility of the soil, and that free labour was always more productive
than serfage. By the light of these principles he discovered why the
peasantry in Russia were so poor, and by what means their condition could
he ameliorated. The Communal land should be divided into family lots, and
the serfs, instead of being forced to work for the proprietor, should pay a
yearly sum as rent. The advantages of this change he perceived clearly—as
clearly as he had formerly perceived the advantages of English agricultural
implements—and he determined to make the experiment on his own estate.
His first step was to call together the more intelligent and influential of
his serfs, and to explain to them his project; but his efforts at explanation
were eminently unsuccessful. Even with regard to ordinary current affairs
he could not express himself in that simple, homely language with which
alone the peasants are familiar, and when he spoke on abstract subjects he
naturally became quite unintelligible to his uneducated audience. The serfs
listened attentively, but understood nothing. He might as well have spoken
to them, as he often did in another kind of society, about the comparative
excellence of Italian and German music. At a second attempt he had rather
more success. The peasants came to understand that what he wished was to
break up the Mir, or rural Commune, and to put them all on obrok—that is
to say, make them pay a yearly sum instead of giving him a certain amount
of agricultural labour. Much to his astonishment, his scheme did not meet
with any sympathy. As to being put on obrok, the serfs did not much object,
though they preferred to remain as they were; but his proposal to break up
the Mir astonished and bewildered them. They regarded it as a sea-captain
might regard the proposal of a scientific wiseacre to knock a hole in the
ship's bottom in order to make her sail faster. Though they did not say
much, he was intelligent enough to see that they would offer a strenuous
passive resistance, and as he did not wish to act tyrannically, he let the
matter drop. Thus a second benevolent scheme was shipwrecked. Many
other schemes had a similar fate, and Victor Alexandr'itch began to perceive

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that it was very difficult to do good in this world, especially when the
persons to be benefited were Russian peasants.
In reality the fault lay less with the serfs than with their master. Victor
Alexandr'itch was by no means a stupid man. On the contrary, he had more
than average talents. Few men were more capable of grasping a new idea
and forming a scheme for its realisation, and few men could play more
dexterously with abstract principles. What he wanted was the power of
dealing with concrete facts. The principles which he had acquired from
University lectures and desultory reading were far too vague and abstract
for practical use. He had studied abstract science without gaining any
technical knowledge of details, and consequently when he stood face to
face with real life he was like a student who, having studied mechanics in
text-books, is suddenly placed in a workshop and ordered to construct a
machine. Only there was one difference: Victor Alexandr'itch was not
ordered to do anything. Voluntarily, without any apparent necessity, he set
himself to work with tools which he could not handle. It was this that
chiefly puzzled the peasants. Why should he trouble himself with these new
schemes, when he might live comfortably as he was? In some of his
projects they could detect a desire to increase the revenue, but in others they
could discover no such motive. In these latter they attributed his conduct to
pure caprice, and put it into the same category as those mad pranks in which
proprietors of jovial humour sometimes indulged.
In the last years of serfage there were a good many landed proprietors
like Victor Alexandr'itch—men who wished to do something beneficent,
and did not know how to do it. When serfage was being abolished the
majority of these men took an active part in the great work and rendered
valuable service to their country. Victor Alexandr'itch acted otherwise. At
first he sympathised warmly with the proposed emancipation and wrote
several articles on the advantages of free labour, but when the Government
took the matter into its own hands he declared that the officials had
deceived and slighted the Noblesse, and he went over to the opposition.
Before the Imperial Edict was signed he went abroad, and travelled for
three years in Germany, France, and Italy. Shortly after his return he
married a pretty, accomplished young lady, the daughter of an eminent
official in St. Petersburg, and since that time he has lived in his country-
house.

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Though a man of education and culture, Victor Alexandr'itch spends his
time in almost as indolent a way as the men of the old school. He rises
somewhat later, and instead of sitting by the open window and gazing into
the courtyard, he turns over the pages of a book or periodical. Instead of
dining at midday and supping at nine o'clock, he takes dejeuner at twelve
and dines at five. He spends less time in sitting in the verandah and pacing
up and down with his hands behind his back, for he can vary the operation
of time-killing by occasionally writing a letter, or by standing behind his
wife at the piano while she plays selections from Mozart and Beethoven.
But these peculiarities are merely variations in detail. If there is any
essential difference between the lives of Victor Alexandr'itch and of Ivan
Ivan'itch, it is in the fact that the former never goes out into the fields to see
how the work is done, and never troubles himself with the state of the
weather, the condition of the crops, and cognate subjects. He leaves the
management of his estate entirely to his steward, and refers to that
personage all peasants who come to him with complaints or petitions.
Though he takes a deep interest in the peasant as an impersonal, abstract
entity, and loves to contemplate concrete examples of the genus in the
works of certain popular authors, he does not like to have any direct
relations with peasants in the flesh. If he has to speak with them he always
feels awkward, and suffers from the odour of their sheepskins. Ivan
Ivan'itch is ever ready to talk with the peasants, and give them sound,
practical advice or severe admonitions; and in the old times he was apt, in
moments of irritation, to supplement his admonitions by a free use of his
fists. Victor Alexandr'itch, on the contrary, never could give any advice
except vague commonplace, and as to using his fist, he would have shrunk
from that, not only from respect to humanitarian principles, but also from
motives which belong to the region of aesthetic sensitiveness.
This difference between the two men has an important influence on their
pecuniary affairs. The stewards of both steal from their masters; but that of
Ivan Ivan'itch steals with difficulty, and to a very limited extent, whereas
that of Victor Alexandr'itch steals regularly and methodically, and counts
his gains, not by kopecks, but by roubles. Though the two estates are of
about the same size and value, they give a very different revenue. The
rough, practical man has a much larger income than his elegant, well-
educated neighbour, and at the same time spends very much less. The
consequences of this, if not at present visible, must some day become

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painfully apparent. Ivan Ivan'itch will doubtless leave to his children an
unencumbered estate and a certain amount of capital. The children of Victor
Alexandr'itch have a different prospect. He has already begun to mortgage
his property and to cut down the timber, and he always finds a deficit at the
end of the year. What will become of his wife and children when the estate
comes to be sold for payment of the mortgage, it is difficult to predict. He
thinks very little of that eventuality, and when his thoughts happen to
wander in that direction he consoles himself with the thought that before the
crash comes he will have inherited a fortune from a rich uncle who has no
children.
The proprietors of the old school lead the same uniform, monotonous life
year after year, with very little variation. Victor Alexandr'itch, on the
contrary, feels the need of a periodical return to "civilised society," and
accordingly spends a few weeks every winter in St. Petersburg. During the
summer months he has the society of his brother—un homme tout a fait
civilise—who possesses an estate a few miles off.
This brother, Vladimir Alexandr'itch, was educated in the School of Law
in St. Petersburg, and has since risen rapidly in the service. He holds now a
prominent position in one of the Ministries, and has the honourary court
title of "Chambellan de sa Majeste." He is a marked man in the higher
circles of the Administration, and will, it is thought, some day become
Minister. Though an adherent of enlightened views, and a professed
"Liberal," he contrives to keep on very good terms with those who imagine
themselves to be "Conservatives." In this he is assisted by his soft, oily
manner. If you express an opinion to him he will always begin by telling
you that you are quite right; and if he ends by showing you that you are
quite wrong, he will at least make you feel that your error is not only
excusable, but in some way highly creditable to your intellectual acuteness
or goodness of heart. In spite of his Liberalism he is a staunch Monarchist,
and considers that the time has not yet come for the Emperor to grant a
Constitution. He recognises that the present order of things has its defects,
but thinks that, on the whole, it acts very well, and would act much better if
certain high officials were removed, and more energetic men put in their
places. Like all genuine St. Petersburg tchinovniks (officials), he has great
faith in the miraculous power of Imperial ukazes and Ministerial circulars,
and believes that national progress consists in multiplying these documents,
and centralising the Administration, so as to give them more effect. As a

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supplementary means of progress he highly approves of aesthetic culture,
and he can speak with some eloquence of the humanising influence of the
fine arts. For his own part he is well acquainted with French and English
classics, and particularly admires Macaulay, whom he declares to have been
not only a great writer, but also a great statesman. Among writers of fiction
he gives the palm to George Eliot, and speaks of the novelists of his own
country, and, indeed, of Russian literature as a whole, in the most
disparaging terms.
A very different estimate of Russian literature is held by Alexander
Ivan'itch N——, formerly arbiter in peasant affairs, and afterwards justice
of the peace. Discussions on this subject often take place between the two.
The admirer of Macaulay declares that Russia has, properly speaking, no
literature whatever, and that the works which bear the names of Russian
authors are nothing but a feeble echo of the literature of Western Europe.
"Imitators," he is wont to say, "skilful imitators, we have produced in
abundance. But where is there a man of original genius? What is our
famous poet Zhukofski? A translator. What is Pushkin? A clever pupil of the
romantic school. What is Lermontoff? A feeble imitator of Byron. What is
Gogol?"
At this point Alexander Ivan'itch invariable intervenes. He is ready to
sacrifice all the pseudo-classic and romantic poetry, and, in fact, the whole
of Russian literature anterior to about the year 1840, but he will not allow
anything disrespectful to be said of Gogol, who about that time founded the
Russian realistic school. "Gogol," he holds, "was a great and original
genius. Gogol not only created a new kind of literature; he at the same time
transformed the reading public, and inaugurated a new era in the intellectual
development of the nation. By his humorous, satirical sketches he swept
away the metaphysical dreaming and foolish romantic affectation then in
fashion, and taught men to see their country as it was, in all its hideous
ugliness. With his help the young generation perceived the rottenness of the
Administration, and the meanness, stupidity, dishonesty, and worthlessness
of the landed proprietors, whom he made the special butt of his ridicule.
The recognition of defects produced a desire for reform. From laughing at
the proprietors there was but one step to despising them, and when we
learned to despise the proprietors we naturally came to sympathise with the
serfs. Thus the Emancipation was prepared by the literature; and when the

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great question had to be solved, it was the literature that discovered a
satisfactory solution."
This is a subject on which Alexander Ivan'itch feels very strongly, and on
which he always speaks with warmth. He knows a good deal regarding the
intellectual movement which began about 1840, and culminated in the great
reforms of the sixties. As a University student he troubled himself very little
with serious academic work, but he read with intense interest all the leading
periodicals, and adopted the doctrine of Belinski that art should not be
cultivated for its own sake, but should be made subservient to social
progress. This belief was confirmed by a perusal of some of George Sand's
earlier works, which were for him a kind of revelation. Social questions
engrossed his thoughts, and all other subjects seemed puny by comparison.
When the Emancipation question was raised he saw an opportunity of
applying some of his theories, and threw himself enthusiastically into the
new movement as an ardent abolitionist. When the law was passed he
helped to put it into execution by serving for three years as an Arbiter of the
Peace. Now he is an old man, but he has preserved some of his youthful
enthusiasm, attends regularly the annual assemblies of the Zemstvo, and
takes a lively interest in all public affairs.
As an ardent partisan of local self-government he habitually scoffs at the
centralised bureaucracy, which he proclaims to be the great bane of his
unhappy country. "These tchinovniks," he is wont to say in moments of
excitement, "who live in St. Petersburg and govern the Empire, know about
as much of Russia as they do of China. They live in a world of official
documents, and are hopelessly ignorant of the real wants and interests of the
people. So long as all the required formalities are duly observed they are
perfectly satisfied. The people may be allowed to die of starvation if only
the fact do not appear in the official reports. Powerless to do any good
themselves, they are powerful enough to prevent others from working for
the public good, and are extremely jealous of all private initiative. How
have they acted, for instance, towards the Zemstvo? The Zemstvo is really a
good institution, and might have done great things if it had been left alone,
but as soon as it began to show a little independent energy the officials at
once clipped its wings and then strangled it. Towards the Press they have
acted in the same way. They are afraid of the Press, because they fear above
all things a healthy public opinion, which the Press alone can create.

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Everything that disturbs the habitual routine alarms them. Russia cannot
make any real progress so long as she is ruled by these cursed tchinovniks."
Scarcely less pernicious than the tchinovnik, in the eyes of our would-be
reformer, is the baritch—that is to say, the pampered, capricious, spoiled
child of mature years, whose life is spent in elegant indolence and fine
talking. Our friend Victor Alexandr'itch is commonly selected as a
representative of this type. "Look at him!" exclaims Alexander Ivan'itch.
"What a useless, contemptible member of society! In spite of his generous
aspirations he never succeeds in doing anything useful to himself or to
others. When the peasant question was raised and there was work to be
done, he went abroad and talked liberalism in Paris and Baden-Baden.
Though he reads, or at least professes to read, books on agriculture, and is
always ready to discourse on the best means of preventing the exhaustion of
the soil, he knows less of farming than a peasant-boy of twelve, and when
he goes into the fields he can hardly distinguish rye from oats. Instead of
babbling about German and Italian music, he would do well to learn a little
about practical farming, and look after his estate."
Whilst Alexander Ivan'itch thus censures his neighbours, he is himself
not without detractors. Some staid old proprietors regard him as a
dangerous man, and quote expressions of his which seem to indicate that his
notions of property are somewhat loose. Many consider that his liberalism
is of a very violent kind, and that he has strong republican sympathies. In
his decisions as Justice he often leaned, it is said, to the side of the peasants
against the proprietors. Then he was always trying to induce the peasants of
the neighbouring villages to found schools, and he had wonderful ideas
about the best method of teaching children. These and similar facts make
many people believe that he has very advanced ideas, and one old
gentleman habitually calls him—half in joke and half in earnest—"our
friend the communist."
In reality Alexander Ivan'itch has nothing of the communist about him.
Though he loudly denounces the tchinovnik spirit—or, as we should say,
red-tape in all its forms—and is an ardent partisan of local self-government,
he is one of the last men in the world to take part in any revolutionary
movement, he would like to see the Central Government enlightened and
controlled by public opinion and by a national representation, but he
believes that this can only be effected by voluntary concessions on the part

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of the autocratic power. He has, perhaps, a sentimental love of the
peasantry, and is always ready to advocate its interests; but he has come too
much in contact with individual peasants to accept those idealised
descriptions in which some popular writers indulge, and it may safely be
asserted that the accusation of his voluntarily favouring peasants at the
expense of the proprietors is wholly unfounded. Alexander Ivan'itch is, in
fact, a quiet, sensible man, who is capable of generous enthusiasm, and is
not at all satisfied with the existing state of things; but he is not a dreamer
and a revolutionnaire, as some of his neighbours assert.
I am afraid I cannot say as much for his younger brother Nikolai, who
lives with him. Nikolai Ivan'itch is a tall, slender man, about sixty years of
age, with emaciated face, bilious complexion and long black hair—
evidently a person of excitable, nervous temperament. When he speaks he
articulates rapidly, and uses more gesticulation than is common among his
countrymen. His favourite subject of conversation, or rather of discourse,
for he more frequently preaches than talks, is the lamentable state of the
country and the worthlessness of the Government. Against the Government
he has a great many causes for complaint, and one or two of a personal
kind. In 1861 he was a student in the University of St. Petersburg. At that
time there was a great deal of public excitement all over Russia, and
especially in the capital. The serfs had just been emancipated, and other
important reforms had been undertaken. There was a general conviction
among the young generation—and it must be added among many older men
—that the autocratic, paternal system of government was at an end, and that
Russia was about to be reorganised according to the most advanced
principles of political and social science. The students, sharing this
conviction, wished to be freed from all academical authority, and to
organise a kind of academic self-government. They desired especially the
right of holding public meetings for the discussion of their common affairs.
The authorities would not allow this, and issued a list of rules prohibiting
meetings and raising the class-fees, so as practically to exclude many of the
poorer students. This was felt to be a wanton insult to the spirit of the new
era. In spite of the prohibition, indignation meetings were held, and fiery
speeches made by male and female orators, first in the class-rooms, and
afterwards in the courtyard of the University. On one occasion a long
procession marched through the principal streets to the house of the
Curator. Never had such a spectacle been seen before in St. Petersburg.

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Timid people feared that it was the commencement of a revolution, and
dreamed about barricades. At last the authorities took energetic measures;
about three hundred students were arrested, and of these, thirty-two were
expelled from the University.
Among those who were expelled was Nicolai Ivan'itch. All his hopes of
becoming a professor, as he had intended, were thereby shipwrecked, and
he had to look out for some other profession. A literary career now seemed
the most promising, and certainly the most congenial to his tastes. It would
enable him to gratify his ambition of being a public man, and give him
opportunities of attacking and annoying his persecutors. He had already
written occasionally for one of the leading periodicals, and now he became
a regular contributor. His stock of positive knowledge was not very large,
but he had the power of writing fluently and of making his readers believe
that he had an unlimited store of political wisdom which the Press-censure
prevented him from publishing. Besides this, he had the talent of saying
sharp, satirical things about those in authority, in such a way that even a
Press censor could not easily raise objections. Articles written in this style
were sure at that time to be popular, and his had a very great success. He
became a known man in literary circles, and for a time all went well. But
gradually he became less cautious, whilst the authorities became more
vigilant. Some copies of a violent seditious proclamation fell into the hands
of the police, and it was generally believed that the document proceeded
from the coterie to which he belonged. From that moment he was carefully
watched, till one night he was unexpectedly roused from his sleep by a
gendarme and conveyed to the fortress.
When a man is arrested in this way for a real or supposed political
offence, there are two modes of dealing with him. He may be tried before a
regular tribunal, or he may be dealt with "by administrative procedure"
(administrativnym poryadkom). In the former case he will, if convicted, be
condemned to imprisonment for a certain term; or, if the offence be of a
graver nature, he may be transported to Siberia either for a fixed period or
for life. By the administrative procedure he is simply removed without a
trial to some distant town, and compelled to live there under police
supervision during his Majesty's pleasure. Nikolai Ivan'itch was treated
"administratively," because the authorities, though convinced that he was a
dangerous character, could not find sufficient evidence to procure his
conviction before a court of justice. For five years he lived under police

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supervision in a small town near the White Sea, and then one day he was
informed, without any explanation, that he might go and live anywhere he
pleased except in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
Since that time he has lived with his brother, and spends his time in
brooding over his grievances and bewailing his shattered illusions. He has
lost none of that fluency which gained him an ephemeral literary reputation,
and can speak by the hour on political and social questions to any one who
will listen to him. It is extremely difficult, however, to follow his
discourses, and utterly impossible to retain them in the memory. They
belong to what may be called political metaphysics—for though he
professes to hold metaphysics in abhorrence, he is himself a thorough
metaphysician in his modes of thought. He lives, indeed, in a world of
abstract conceptions, in which he can scarcely perceive concrete facts, and
his arguments are always a kind of clever juggling with such equivocal,
conventional terms as aristocracy, bourgeoisie, monarchy, and the like. At
concrete facts he arrives, not directly by observation, but by deductions
from general principles, so that his facts can never by any possibility
contradict his theories. Then he has certain axioms which he tacitly
assumes, and on which all his arguments are based; as, for instance, that
everything to which the term "liberal" can be applied must necessarily be
good at all times and under all conditions.
Among a mass of vague conceptions which it is impossible to reduce to
any clearly defined form he has a few ideas which are perhaps not strictly
true, but which are at least intelligible. Among these is his conviction that
Russia has let slip a magnificent opportunity of distancing all Europe on the
road of progress. She might, he thinks, at the time of the Emancipation,
have boldly accepted all the most advanced principles of political and social
science, and have completely reorganised the political and social structure
in accordance with them. Other nations could not take such a step, because
they are old and decrepit, filled with stubborn, hereditary prejudices, and
cursed with an aristocracy and a bourgeoisie; but Russia is young, knows
nothing of social castes, and has no deep-rooted prejudices to contend with.
The population is like potter's clay, which can be made to assume any form
that science may recommend. Alexander II. began a magnificent
sociological experiment, but he stopped half-way.

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Some day, he believes, the experiment will be completed, but not by the
autocratic power. In his opinion autocracy is "played out," and must give
way to Parliamentary institutions. For him a Constitution is a kind of
omnipotent fetish. You may try to explain to him that a Parliamentary
regime, whatever its advantages may be, necessarily produces political
parties and political conflicts, and is not nearly so suitable for grand
sociological experiments as a good paternal despotism. You may try to
convince him that, though it may be difficult to convert an autocrat, it is
infinitely more difficult to convert a House of Commons. But all your
efforts will be in vain. He will assure you that a Russian Parliament would
be something quite different from what Parliaments commonly are. It would
contain no parties, for Russia has no social castes, and would be guided
entirely by scientific considerations—as free from prejudice and personal
influences as a philosopher speculating on the nature of the Infinite! In
short, he evidently imagines that a national Parliament would be composed
of himself and his friends, and that the nation would calmly submit to their
ukazes, as it has hitherto submitted to the ukazes of the Tsars.
Pending the advent of this political Millennium, when unimpassioned
science is to reign supreme, Nikolai Ivan'itch allows himself the luxury of
indulging in some very decided political animosities, and he hates with the
fervour of a fanatic. Firstly and chiefly, he hates what he calls the
bourgeoisie—he is obliged to use the French word, because his native
language does not contain an equivalent term—and especially capitalists of
all sorts and dimensions. Next, he hates aristocracy, especially a form of
aristocracy called Feudalism. To these abstract terms he does not attach a
very precise meaning, but he hates the entities which they are supposed to
represent quite as heartily as if they were personal enemies. Among the
things which he hates in his own country, the Autocratic Power holds the
first place. Next, as an emanation from the Autocratic Power, come the
tchinovniks, and especially the gendarmes. Then come the landed
proprietors. Though he is himself a landed proprietor, he regards the class
as cumberers of the ground, and thinks that all their land should be
confiscated and distributed among the peasantry.
All proprietors have the misfortune to come under his sweeping
denunciations, because they are inconsistent with his ideal of a peasant
Empire, but he recognises amongst them degrees of depravity. Some are
simply obstructive, whilst others are actively prejudicial to the public

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welfare. Among these latter a special object of aversion is Prince S——,
because he not only possesses very large estates, but at the same time has
aristocratic pretensions, and calls himself Conservative.
Prince S—— is by far the most important man in the district. His family
is one of the oldest in the country, but he does not owe his influence to his
pedigree, for pedigree pure and simple does not count for much in Russia.
He is influential and respected because he is a great land-holder with a high
official position, and belongs by birth to that group of families which forms
the permanent nucleus of the ever-changing Court society. His father and
grandfather were important personages in the Administration and at Court,
and his sons and grandsons will probably in this respect follow in the
footsteps of their ancestors. Though in the eye of the law all nobles are
equal, and, theoretically speaking, promotion is gained exclusively by
personal merit, yet, in reality, those who have friends at Court rise more
easily and more rapidly.
The Prince has had a prosperous but not very eventful life. He was
educated, first at home, under an English tutor, and afterwards in the Corps
des Pages. On leaving this institution he entered a regiment of the Guards,
and rose steadily to high military rank. His activity, however, has been
chiefly in the civil administration, and he now has a seat in the Council of
State. Though he has always taken a certain interest in public affairs, he did
not play an important part in any of the great reforms. When the peasant
question was raised he sympathised with the idea of Emancipation, but did
not at all sympathise with the idea of giving land to the emancipated serfs
and preserving the Communal institutions. What he desired was that the
proprietors should liberate their serfs without any pecuniary indemnity, and
should receive in return a certain share of political power. His scheme was
not adopted, but he has not relinquished the hope that the great landed
proprietors may somehow obtain a social and political position similar to
that of the great land-owners in England.
Official duties and social relations compel the Prince to live for a large
part of the year in the capital. He spends only a few weeks yearly on his
estate. The house is large, and fitted up in the English style, with a view to
combining elegance and comfort. It contains several spacious apartments, a
library, and a billiard-room. There is an extensive park, an immense garden
with hot houses, numerous horses and carriages, and a legion of servants. In

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the drawing-room is a plentiful supply of English and French books,
newspapers, and periodicals, including the Journal de St. Petersbourg,
which gives the news of the day.
The family have, in short, all the conveniences and comforts which
money and refinement can procure, but it cannot be said that they greatly
enjoy the time spent in the country. The Princess has no decided objection
to it. She is devoted to a little grandchild, is fond of reading and
correspondence, amuses herself with a school and hospital which she has
founded for the peasantry, and occasionally drives over to see her friend, the
Countess N——, who lives about fifteen miles off.
The Prince, however, finds country life excessively dull. He does not care
for riding or shooting, and he finds nothing else to do. He knows nothing
about the management of his estate, and holds consultations with the
steward merely pro forma—this estate and the others which he possesses in
different provinces being ruled by a head-steward in St. Petersburg, in
whom he has the most complete confidence. In the vicinity there is no one
with whom he cares to associate. Naturally he is not a sociable man, and he
has acquired a stiff, formal, reserved manner that is rarely met with in
Russia. This manner repels the neighbouring proprietors—a fact that he
does not at all regret, for they do not belong to his monde, and they have in
their manners and habits a free-and-easy rusticity which is positively
disagreeable to him. His relations with them are therefore confined to
formal calls. The greater part of the day he spends in listless loitering,
frequently yawning, regretting the routine of St. Petersburg life—the
pleasant chats with his colleagues, the opera, the ballet, the French theatre,
and the quiet rubber at the Club Anglais. His spirits rise as the day of his
departure approaches, and when he drives off to the station he looks bright
and cheerful. If he consulted merely his own tastes he would never visit his
estates at all, and would spend his summer holidays in Germany, France, or
Switzerland, as he did in his bachelor days; but as a large landowner he
considers it right to sacrifice his personal inclinations to the duties of his
position.
There is, by the way, another princely magnate in the district, and I ought
perhaps to introduce him to my readers, because he represents worthily a
new type. Like Prince S——, of whom I have just spoken, he is a great
land-owner and a descendant of the half-mythical Rurik; but he has no

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official rank, and does not possess a single grand cordon. In that respect he
has followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, who had
something of the frondeur spirit, and preferred the position of a grand
seigneur and a country gentleman to that of a tchinovnik and a courtier. In
the Liberal camp he is regarded as a Conservative, but he has little in
common with the Krepostnik, who declares that the reforms of the last half-
century were a mistake, that everything is going to the bad, that the
emancipated serfs are all sluggards, drunkards, and thieves, that the local
self-government is an ingenious machine for wasting money, and that the
reformed law-courts have conferred benefits only on the lawyers. On the
contrary, he recognises the necessity and beneficent results of the reforms,
and with regard to the future he has none of the despairing pessimism of the
incorrigible old Tory.
But in order that real progress should be made, he thinks that certain
current and fashionable errors must be avoided, and among these errors he
places, in the first rank, the views and principles of the advanced Liberals,
who have a blind admiration for Western Europe, and for what they are
pleased to call the results of science. Like the Liberals of the West, these
gentlemen assume that the best form of government is constitutionalism,
monarchical or republican, on a broad democratic basis, and towards the
realisation of this ideal all their efforts are directed. Not so our Conservative
friend. While admitting that democratic Parliamentary institutions may be
the best form of government for the more advanced nations of the West, he
maintains that the only firm foundation for the Russian Empire, and the
only solid guarantee of its future prosperity, is the Autocratic Power, which
is the sole genuine representative of the national spirit. Looking at the past
from this point of view, he perceives that the Tsars have ever identified
themselves with the nation, and have always understood, in part
instinctively and in part by reflection, what the nation really required.
Whenever the infiltration of Western ideas threatened to swamp the national
individuality, the Autocratic Power intervened and averted the danger by
timely precautions. Something of the kind may be observed, he believes, at
present, when the Liberals are clamouring for a Parliament and a
Constitution; but the Autocratic Power is on the alert, and is making itself
acquainted with the needs of the people by means far more effectual than
could be supplied by oratorical politicians.

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With the efforts of the Zemstvo in this direction, and with the activity of
the Zemstvo generally, the Prince has little sympathy, partly because the
institution is in the hands of the Liberals and is guided by their unpractical
ideas, and partly because it enables some ambitious outsiders to acquire the
influence in local affairs which ought to be exercised by the old-established
noble families of the neighbourhood. What he would like to see is an
enlightened, influential gentry working in conjunction with the Autocratic
Power for the good of the country. If Russia could produce a few hundred
thousand men like himself, his ideal might perhaps be realised. For the
present, such men are extremely rare—I should have difficulty in naming a
dozen of them—and aristocratic ideas are extremely unpopular among the
great majority of the educated classes. When a Russian indulges in political
speculation, he is pretty sure to show himself thoroughly democratic, with a
strong leaning to socialism.
The Prince belongs to the highest rank of the Russian Noblesse. If we
wish to get an idea of the lowest rank, we can find in the neighbourhood a
number of poor, uneducated men, who live in small, squalid houses, and are
not easily to be distinguished from peasants. They are nobles, like his
Highness; but, unlike him, they enjoy no social consideration, and their
landed property consists of a few acres of land which barely supply them
with the first necessaries of life. If we went to other parts of the country we
might find men in this condition bearing the title of Prince! This is the
natural result of the Russian law of inheritance, which does not recognise
the principle of primogeniture with regard to titles and estates. All the sons
of a Prince are Princes, and at his death his property, movable and
immovable, is divided amongst them.

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CHAPTER XXIII
SOCIAL CLASSES

Do Social Classes or Castes Exist in Russia?—Well-marked Social Types
—Classes Recognised by the Legislation and the Official Statistics—Origin
and Gradual Formation of these Classes—Peculiarity in the Historical
Development of Russia—Political Life and Political Parties.
In the preceding pages I have repeatedly used the expression "social
classes," and probably more than once the reader has felt inclined to ask,
What are social classes in the Russian sense of the term? It may be well,
therefore, before going farther, to answer this question.
If the question were put to a Russian it is not at all unlikely that he would
reply somewhat in this fashion: "In Russia there are no social classes, and
there never have been any. That fact constitutes one of the most striking
peculiarities of her historical development, and one of the surest
foundations of her future greatness. We know nothing, and have never
known anything, of those class distinctions and class enmities which in
Western Europe have often rudely shaken society in past times, and imperil
its existence in the future."
This statement will not be readily accepted by the traveller who visits
Russia with no preconceived ideas and forms his opinions from his own
observations. To him it seems that class distinctions form one of the most
prominent characteristics of Russian society. In a few days he learns to
distinguish the various classes by their outward appearance. He easily
recognises the French-speaking nobles in West-European costume; the
burly, bearded merchant in black cloth cap and long, shiny, double-breasted
coat; the priest with his uncut hair and flowing robes; the peasant with his
full, fair beard and unsavoury, greasy sheepskin. Meeting everywhere those
well-marked types, he naturally assumes that Russian society is composed
of exclusive castes; and this first impression will be fully confirmed by a
glance at the Code. On examining that monumental work, he finds that an
entire volume—and by no means the smallest—is devoted to the rights and
obligations of the various classes. From this he concludes that the classes

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have a legal as well as an actual existence. To make assurance doubly sure
he turns to official statistics, and there he finds the following table:

Hereditary nobles........652,887
Personal nobles..........374,367
Clerical classes.........695,905
Town classes...........7,196,005
Rural classes.........63,840,291
Military classes.......4,767,703
Foreigners...............153,185
————— 77,680,293*

* Livron: "Statistitcheskoe Obozrenie Rossiiskoi Imperii,"
St. Petersburg, 1875. The above figures include the whole
Empire. The figures according to the latest census (1897)
are not yet available.

Armed with these materials, the traveller goes to his Russian friends who
have assured him that their country knows nothing of class distinctions. He
is confident of being able to convince them that they have been labouring
under a strange delusion, but he will be disappointed. They will tell him that
these laws and statistics prove nothing, and that the categories therein
mentioned are mere administrative fictions.
This apparent contradiction is to be explained by the equivocal meaning
of the Russian terms Sosloviya and Sostoyaniya, which are commonly
translated "social classes." If by these terms are meant "castes" in the
Oriental sense, then it may be confidently asserted that such do not exist in
Russia. Between the nobles, the clergy, the burghers, and the peasants there
are no distinctions of race and no impassable barriers. The peasant often
becomes a merchant, and there are many cases on record of peasants and
sons of parish priests becoming nobles. Until very recently the parish clergy
composed, as we have seen, a peculiar and exclusive class, with many of
the characteristics of a caste; but this has been changed, and it may now be
said that in Russia there are no castes in the Oriental sense.
If the word Sosloviya be taken to mean an organised political unit with
an esprit de corps and a clearly conceived political aim, it may likewise be
admitted that there are none in Russia. As there has been for centuries no
political life among the subjects of the Tsars, there have been no political
parties.
On the other hand, to say that social classes have never existed in Russia
and that the categories which appear in the legislation and in the official

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statistics are mere administrative fictions, is a piece of gross exaggeration.
From the very beginning of Russian history we can detect unmistakably
the existence of social classes, such as the Princes, the Boyars, the armed
followers of the Princes, the peasantry, the slaves, and various others; and
one of the oldest legal documents which we possess—the "Russian Right"
(Russkaya Pravda) of the Grand Prince Yaroslaff (1019-1054)—contains
irrefragable proof, in the penalties attached to various crimes, that these
classes were formally recognised by the legislation. Since that time they
have frequently changed their character, but they have never at any period
ceased to exist.
In ancient times, when there was very little administrative regulation, the
classes had perhaps no clearly defined boundaries, and the peculiarities
which distinguished them from each other were actual rather than legal—
lying in the mode of life and social position rather than in peculiar
obligations and privileges. But as the autocratic power developed and strove
to transform the nation into a State with a highly centralised administration,
the legal element in the social distinctions became more and more
prominent. For financial and other purposes the people had to be divided
into various categories. The actual distinctions were of course taken as the
basis of the legal classification, but the classifying had more than a merely
formal significance. The necessity of clearly defining the different groups
entailed the necessity of elevating and strengthening the barriers which
already existed between them, and the difficulty of passing from one group
to another was thereby increased.
In this work of classification Peter the Great especially distinguished
himself. With his insatiable passion for regulation, he raised formidable
barriers between the different categories, and defined the obligations of
each with microscopic minuteness. After his death the work was carried on
in the same spirit, and the tendency reached its climax in the reign of
Nicholas, when the number of students to be received in the universities
was determined by Imperial ukaz!
In the reign of Catherine a new element was introduced into the official
conception of social classes. Down to her time the Government had thought
merely of class obligations; under the influence of Western ideas she
introduced the conception of class rights. She wished, as we have seen, to
have in her Empire a Noblesse and tiers-etat like those which existed in

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France, and for this purpose she granted, first to the Dvoryanstvo and
afterwards to the towns, an Imperial Charter, or Bill of Rights. Succeeding
sovereigns have acted in the same spirit, and the Code now confers on each
class numerous privileges as well as numerous obligations.
Thus, we see, the oft-repeated assertion that the Russian social classes are
simply artificial categories created by the legislature is to a certain extent
true, but is by no means accurate. The social groups, such as peasants,
landed proprietors, and the like, came into existence in Russia, as in other
countries, by the simple force of circumstances. The legislature merely
recognised and developed the social distinctions which already existed. The
legal status, obligations, and rights of each group were minutely defined
and regulated, and legal barriers were added to the actual barriers which
separated the groups from each other.
What is peculiar in the historical development of Russia is this: until
lately she remained an almost exclusively agricultural Empire with
abundance of unoccupied land. Her history presents, therefore, few of those
conflicts which result from the variety of social conditions and the
intensified struggle for existence. Certain social groups were, indeed,
formed in the course of time, but they were never allowed to fight out their
own battles. The irresistible autocratic power kept them always in check
and fashioned them into whatever form it thought proper, defining minutely
and carefully their obligations, their rights, their mutual relations, and their
respective positions in the political organisation. Hence we find in the
history of Russia almost no trace of those class hatreds which appear so
conspicuously in the history of Western Europe.*

* This is, I believe, the true explanation of an important
fact, which the Slavophils endeavoured to explain by an
ill-authenticated legend (vide supra p.151).

The practical consequence of all this is that in Russia at the present day
there is very little caste spirit or caste prejudice. Within half-a-dozen years
after the emancipation of the serfs, proprietors and peasants, forgetting
apparently their old relationship of master and serf, were working amicably
together in the new local administration, and not a few similar curious facts
might be cited. The confident anticipation of many Russians that their
country will one day enjoy political life without political parties is, if not a
contradiction in terms, at least a Utopian absurdity; but we may be sure that

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when political parties do appear they will be very different from those
which exist in Germany, France, and England.
Meanwhile, let us see how the country is governed without political
parties and without political life in the West-European sense of the term.
This will form the subject of our next chapter.

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CHAPTER XXIV
THE IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION AND THE OFFICIALS

The Officials in Norgorod Assist Me in My Studies—The Modern
Imperial Administration Created by Peter the Great, and Developed by his
Successors—A Slavophil's View of the Administration—The
Administration Briefly Described—The Tchinovniks, or Officials—Official
Titles, and Their Real Significance—What the Administration Has Done for
Russia in the Past—Its Character Determined by the Peculiar Relation
between the Government and the People—Its Radical Vices—Bureaucratic
Remedies—Complicated Formal Procedure—The Gendarmerie: My
Personal Relations with this Branch of the Administration; Arrest and
Release—A Strong, Healthy Public Opinion the Only Effectual Remedy for
Bad Administration.
My administrative studies were begun in Novgorod. One of my reasons
for spending a winter in that provincial capital was that I might study the
provincial administration, and as soon as I had made the acquaintance of the
leading officials I explained to them the object I had in view. With the
kindly bonhomie which distinguishes the Russian educated classes, they all
volunteered to give me every assistance in their power, but some of them,
on mature reflection, evidently saw reason to check their first generous
impulse. Among these was the Vice-Governor, a gentleman of German
origin, and therefore more inclined to be pedantic than a genuine Russian.
When I called on him one evening and reminded him of his friendly offer, I
found to my surprise that he had in the meantime changed his mind. Instead
of answering my first simple inquiry, he stared at me fixedly, as if for the
purpose of detecting some covert, malicious design, and then, putting on an
air of official dignity, informed me that as I had not been authorised by the
Minister to make these investigations, he could not assist me, and would
certainly not allow me to examine the archives.
This was not encouraging, but it did not prevent me from applying to the
Governor, and I found him a man of a very different stamp. Delighted to
meet a foreigner who seemed anxious to study seriously in an unbiassed

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frame of mind the institutions of his much-maligned native country, he
willingly explained to me the mechanism of the administration which he
directed and controlled, and kindly placed at my disposal the books and
documents in which I could find the historical and practical information
which I required.
This friendly attitude of his Excellency towards me soon became
generally known in the town, and from that moment my difficulties were at
an end. The minor officials no longer hesitated to initiate me into the
mysteries of their respective departments, and at last even the Vice-
Governor threw off his reserve and followed the example of his colleagues.
The elementary information thus acquired I had afterwards abundant
opportunities of completing by observation and study in other parts of the
Empire, and I now propose to communicate to the reader a few of the more
general results.
The gigantic administrative machine which holds together all the various
parts of the vast Empire has been gradually created by successive
generations, but we may say roughly that it was first designed and
constructed by Peter the Great. Before his time the country was governed in
a rude, primitive fashion. The Grand Princes of Moscow, in subduing their
rivals and annexing the surrounding principalities, merely cleared the
ground for a great homogeneous State. Wily, practical politicians, rather
than statesmen of the doctrinaire type, they never dreamed of introducing
uniformity and symmetry into the administration as a whole. They
developed the ancient institutions so far as these were useful and consistent
with the exercise of autocratic power, and made only such alterations as
practical necessity demanded. And these necessary alterations were more
frequently local than general. Special decisions, instruction to particular
officials, and charters for particular communes of proprietors were much
more common than general legislative measures.
In short, the old Muscovite Tsars practised a hand-to-mouth policy,
destroying whatever caused temporary inconvenience, and giving little heed
to what did not force itself upon their attention. Hence, under their rule the
administration presented not only territorial peculiarities, but also an ill-
assorted combination of different systems in the same district—a
conglomeration of institutions belonging to different epochs, like a fleet
composed of triremes, three-deckers, and iron-clads.

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This irregular system, or rather want of system, seemed highly
unsatisfactory to the logical mind of Peter the Great, and he conceived the
grand design of sweeping it away, and putting in its place a symmetrical
bureaucratic machine. It is scarcely necessary to say that this magnificent
project, so foreign to the traditional ideas and customs of the people, was
not easily realised. Imagine a man, without technical knowledge, without
skilled workmen, without good tools, and with no better material than soft,
crumbling sandstone, endeavouring to build a palace on a marsh! The
undertaking would seem to reasonable minds utterly absurd, and yet it must
be admitted that Peter's project was scarcely more feasible. He had neither
technical knowledge, nor the requisite materials, nor a firm foundation to
build on. With his usual Titanic energy he demolished the old structure, but
his attempts to construct were little more than a series of failures. In his
numerous ukazes he has left us a graphic description of his efforts, and it is
at once instructive and pathetic to watch the great worker toiling
indefatigably at his self-imposed task. His instruments are constantly
breaking in his hands. The foundations of the building are continually
giving way, and the lower tiers crumbling under the superincumbent
weight. Now and then a whole section is found to be unsuitable, and is
ruthlessly pulled down, or falls of its own accord. And yet the builder toils
on, with a perseverance and an energy of purpose that compel admiration,
frankly confessing his mistakes and failures, and patiently seeking the
means of remedying them, never allowing a word of despondency to escape
him, and never despairing of ultimate success. And at length death comes,
and the mighty builder is snatched away suddenly in the midst of his
unfinished labours, bequeathing to his successors the task of carrying on the
great work.
None of these successors possessed Peter's genius and energy—with the
exception perhaps of Catherine II.—but they were all compelled by the
force of circumstances to adopt his plans. A return to the old rough-and-
ready rule of the local Voyevods was impossible. As the Autocratic Power
became more and more imbued with Western ideas, it felt more and more
the need of new means for carrying them out, and accordingly it strove to
systematise and centralise the administration.
In this change we may perceive a certain analogy with the history of the
French administration from the reign of Philippe le Bel to that of Louis
XIV. In both countries we see the central power bringing the local

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administrative organs more and more under its control, till at last it
succeeds in creating a thoroughly centralised bureaucratic organisation. But
under this superficial resemblance lie profound differences. The French
kings had to struggle with provincial sovereignties and feudal rights, and
when they had annihilated this opposition they easily found materials with
which to build up the bureaucratic structure. The Russian sovereigns, on the
contrary, met with no such opposition, but they had great difficulty in
finding bureaucratic material amongst their uneducated, undisciplined
subjects, notwithstanding the numerous schools and colleges which were
founded and maintained simply for the purpose of preparing men for the
public service.
The administration was thus brought much nearer to the West-European
ideal, but some people have grave doubts as to whether it became thereby
better adapted to the practical wants of the people for whom it was created.
On this point a well-known Slavophil once made to me some remarks
which are worthy of being recorded. "You have observed," he said, "that till
very recently there was in Russia an enormous amount of official
peculation, extortion, and misgovernment of every kind, that the courts of
law were dens of iniquity, that the people often committed perjury, and
much more of the same sort, and it must be admitted that all this has not yet
entirely disappeared. But what does it prove? That the Russian people are
morally inferior to the German? Not at all. It simply proves that the German
system of administration, which was forced upon them without their
consent, was utterly unsuited to their nature. If a young growing boy be
compelled to wear very tight boots, he will probably burst them, and the
ugly rents will doubtless produce an unfavourable impression on the
passers-by; but surely it is better that the boots should burst than that the
feet should be deformed. Now, the Russian people was compelled to put on
not only tight boots, but also a tight jacket, and, being young and vigorous,
it burst them. Narrow-minded, pedantic Germans can neither understand
nor provide for the wants of the broad Slavonic nature."
In its present form the Russian administration seems at first sight a very
imposing edifice. At the top of the pyramid stands the Emperor, "the
autocratic monarch," as Peter the Great described him, "who has to give an
account of his acts to no one on earth, but has power and authority to rule
his States and lands as a Christian sovereign according to his own will and
judgment." Immediately below the Emperor we see the Council of State,

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the Committee of Ministers, and the Senate, which represent respectively
the legislative, the administrative, and the judicial power. An Englishman
glancing over the first volume of the great Code of Laws might imagine that
the Council of State is a kind of Parliament, and the Committee of Ministers
a cabinet in our sense of the term, but in reality both institutions are simply
incarnations of the Autocratic Power. Though the Council is entrusted by
law with many important functions—such as discussing Bills, criticising the
annual budget, declaring war and concluding peace—it has merely a
consultative character, and the Emperor is not in any way bound by its
decisions. The Committee is not at all a cabinet as we understand the word.
The Ministers are directly and individually responsible to the Emperor, and
therefore the Committee has no common responsibility or other cohesive
force. As to the Senate, it has descended from its high estate. It was
originally entrusted with the supreme power during the absence or minority
of the monarch, and was intended to exercise a controlling influence in all
sections of the administration, but now its activity is restricted to judicial
matters, and it is little more than a supreme court of appeal.
Immediately below these three institutions stand the Ministries, ten in
number. They are the central points in which converge the various kinds of
territorial administration, and from which radiates the Imperial will all over
the Empire.
For the purpose of territorial administration Russia proper—that is to say,
European Russia, exclusive of Poland, the Baltic Provinces, Finland and the
Caucasus—is divided into forty-nine provinces or "Governments"
(gubernii), and each Government is subdivided into Districts (uyezdi). The
average area of a province is about the size of Portugal, but some are as
small as Belgium, whilst one at least is twenty-five times as big. The
population, however, does not correspond to the amount of territory. In the
largest province, that of Archangel, there are only about 350,000
inhabitants, whilst in two of the smaller ones there are over three millions.
The districts likewise vary greatly in size. Some are smaller than
Oxfordshire or Buckingham, and others are bigger than the whole of the
United Kingdom.
Over each province is placed a Governor, who is assisted in his duties by
a Vice-Governor and a small council. According to the legislation of
Catherine II., which still appears in the Code and has only been partially

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repealed, the Governor is termed "the steward of the province," and is
entrusted with so many and such delicate duties, that in order to obtain
qualified men for the post it would be necessary to realise the great
Empress's design of creating, by education, "a new race of people." Down
to the time of the Crimean War the Governors understood the term
"stewards" in a very literal sense, and ruled in a most arbitrary, high-handed
style, often exercising an important influence on the civil and criminal
tribunals. These extensive and vaguely defined powers have now been very
much curtailed, partly by positive legislation, and partly by increased
publicity and improved means of communication. All judicial matters have
been placed theoretically beyond the Governor's control, and many of his
former functions are now fulfilled by the Zemstvo—the new organ of local
self-government. Besides this, all ordinary current affairs are regulated by
an already big and ever-growing body of instructions, in the form of
Imperial orders and ministerial circulars, and as soon as anything not
provided for by the instructions happens to occur, the minister is consulted
through the post-office or by telegraph.
Even within the sphere of their lawful authority the Governors have now
a certain respect for public opinion and occasionally a very wholesome
dread of casual newspaper correspondents. Thus the men who were
formerly described by the satirists as "little satraps" have sunk to the level
of subordinate officials. I can confidently say that many (I believe the
majority) of them are honest, upright men, who are perhaps not endowed
with any unusual administrative capacities, but who perform their duties
faithfully according to their lights. If any representatives of the old "satraps"
still exist, they must be sought for in the outlying Asiatic provinces.
Independent of the Governor, who is the local representative of the
Ministry of the Interior, are a number of resident officials, who represent
the other ministries, and each of them has a bureau, with the requisite
number of assistants, secretaries, and scribes.
To keep this vast and complex bureaucratic machine in motion it is
necessary to have a large and well-drilled army of officials. These are
drawn chiefly from the ranks of the Noblesse and the clergy, and form a
peculiar social class called Tchinovniks, or men with Tchins. As the Tchin
plays an important part in Russia, not only in the official world, but also to
some extent in social life, it may be well to explain its significance.

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All offices, civil and military, are, according to a scheme invented by
Peter the Great, arranged in fourteen classes or ranks, and to each class or
rank a particular name is attached. As promotion is supposed to be given
according to personal merit, a man who enters the public service for the
first time must, whatever be his social position, begin in the lower ranks,
and work his way upwards. Educational certificates may exempt him from
the necessity of passing through the lowest classes, and the Imperial will
may disregard the restrictions laid down by law; but as general rule a man
must begin at or near the bottom of the official ladder, and he must remain
on each step a certain specified time. The step on which he is for the
moment standing, or, in other words, the official rank or tchin which he
possesses determines what offices he is competent to hold. Thus rank or
tchin is a necessary condition for receiving an appointment, but it does not
designate any actual office, and the names of the different ranks are
extremely apt to mislead a foreigner.
We must always bear this in mind when we meet with those imposing
titles which Russian tourists sometimes put on their visiting cards, such as
"Conseiller de Cour," "Conseiller d'Etat," "Conseiller prive de S. M.
l'Empereur de toutes les Russies." It would be uncharitable to suppose that
these titles are used with the intention of misleading, but that they do
sometimes mislead there cannot be the least doubt. I shall never forget the
look of intense disgust which I once saw on the face of an American who
had invited to dinner a "Conseiller de Cour," on the assumption that he
would have a Court dignitary as his guest, and who casually discovered that
the personage in question was simply an insignificant official in one of the
public offices. No doubt other people have had similar experiences. The
unwary foreigner who has heard that there is in Russia a very important
institution called the "Conseil d'Etat," naturally supposes that a "Conseiller
d'Etat" is a member of that venerable body; and if he meets "Son Excellence
le Conseiller prive," he is pretty sure to assume—especially if the word
"actuel" has been affixed—that he sees before him a real living member of
the Russian Privy Council. When to the title is added, "de S. M. l'Empereur
de toutes les Russies," a boundless field is opened up to the non-Russian
imagination. In reality these titles are not nearly so important as they seem.
The soi-disant "Conseiller de Cour" has probably nothing to do with the
Court. The Conseiller d'Etat is so far from being a member of the Conseil
d'Etat that he cannot possibly become a member till he receives a higher

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tchin.* As to the Privy Councillor, it is sufficient to say that the Privy
Council, which had a very odious reputation in its lifetime, died more than a
century ago, and has not since been resuscitated. The explanation of these
anomalies is to be found in the fact that the Russian tchins, like the German
honorary titles—Hofrath, Staatsrath, Geheimrath—of which they are a
literal translation, indicate not actual office, but simply official rank.
Formerly the appointment to an office generally depended on the tchin; now
there is a tendency to reverse the old order of things and make the tchin
depend upon the office actually held.

* In Russian the two words are quite different; the Council
is called Gosudarstvenny sovet, and the title Statski
sovetnik.

The reader of practical mind who is in the habit of considering results
rather than forms and formalities desires probably no further description of
the Russian bureaucracy, but wishes to know simply how it works in
practice. What has it done for Russia in the past, and what is it doing in the
present?
At the present day, when faith in despotic civilisers and paternal
government has been rudely shaken, and the advantages of a free,
spontaneous national development are fully recognised, centralised
bureaucracies have everywhere fallen into bad odour. In Russia the dislike
to them is particularly strong, because it has there something more than a
purely theoretical basis. The recollection of the reign of Nicholas I., with its
stern military regime, and minute, pedantic formalism, makes many
Russians condemn in no measured terms the administration under which
they live, and most Englishmen will feel inclined to endorse this
condemnation. Before passing sentence, however, we ought to know that
the system has at least an historical justification, and we must not allow our
love of constitutional liberty and local self-government to blind us to the
distinction between theoretical and historical possibility. What seems to
political philosophers abstractly the best possible government may be
utterly inapplicable in certain concrete cases. We need not attempt to decide
whether it is better for humanity that Russia should exist as a nation, but we
may boldly assert that without a strongly centralised administration Russia
would never have become one of the great European Powers. Until
comparatively recent times the part of the world which is known as the

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Russian Empire was a conglomeration of independent or semi-independent
political units, animated with centrifugal as well as centripetal forces; and
even at the present day it is far from being a compact homogeneous State. It
was the autocratic power, with the centralised administration as its
necessary complement, that first created Russia, then saved her from
dismemberment and political annihilation, and ultimately secured for her a
place among European nations by introducing Western civilisation.
Whilst thus recognising clearly that autocracy and a strongly centralised
administration were necessary first for the creation and afterwards for the
preservation of national independence, we must not shut our eyes to the evil
consequences which resulted from this unfortunate necessity. It was in the
nature of things that the Government, aiming at the realisation of designs
which its subjects neither sympathised with nor clearly understood, should
have become separated from the nation; and the reckless haste and violence
with which it attempted to carry out its schemes aroused a spirit of positive
opposition among the masses. A considerable section of the people long
looked on the reforming Tsars as incarnations of the spirit of evil, and the
Tsars in their turn looked upon the people as raw material for the realisation
of their political designs. This peculiar relation between the nation and the
Government has given the key-note to the whole system of administration.
The Government has always treated the people as minors, incapable of
understanding its political aims, and only very partially competent to look
after their own local affairs. The officials have naturally acted in the same
spirit. Looking for direction and approbation merely to their superiors, they
have systematically treated those over whom they were placed as a
conquered or inferior race. The State has thus come to be regarded as an
abstract entity, with interests entirely different from those of the human
beings composing it; and in all matters in which State interests are supposed
to be involved, the rights of individuals are ruthlessly sacrificed.
If we remember that the difficulties of centralised administration must be
in direct proportion to the extent and territorial variety of the country to be
governed, we may readily understand how slowly and imperfectly the
administrative machine necessarily works in Russia. The whole of the vast
region stretching from the Polar Ocean to the Caspian, and from the shores
of the Baltic to the confines of the Celestial Empire, is administered from
St. Petersburg. The genuine bureaucrat has a wholesome dread of formal
responsibility, and generally tries to avoid it by taking all matters out of the

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hands of his subordinates, and passing them on to the higher authorities. As
soon, therefore, as affairs are caught up by the administrative machine they
begin to ascend, and probably arrive some day at the cabinet of the minister.
Thus the ministries are flooded with papers—many of the most trivial
import—from all parts of the Empire; and the higher officials, even if they
had the eyes of an Argus and the hands of a Briareus, could not possibly
fulfil conscientiously the duties imposed on them. In reality the Russian
administrators of the higher ranks recall neither Argus nor Briareus. They
commonly show neither an extensive nor a profound knowledge of the
country which they are supposed to govern, and seem always to have a fair
amount of leisure time at their disposal.
Besides the unavoidable evils of excessive centralisation, Russia has had
to suffer much from the jobbery, venality, and extortion of the officials.
When Peter the Great one day proposed to hang every man who should
steal as much as would buy a rope, his Procurator-General frankly replied
that if his Majesty put his project into execution there would be no officials
left. "We all steal," added the worthy official; "the only difference is that
some of us steal larger amounts and more openly than others." Since these
words were spoken nearly two centuries have passed, and during all that
time Russia has been steadily making progress, but until the accession of
Alexander II. in 1855 little change took place in the moral character of the
administration. Some people still living can remember the time when they
could have repeated, without much exaggeration, the confession of Peter's
Procurator-General.
To appreciate aright this ugly phenomenon we must distinguish two
kinds of venality. On the one hand there was the habit of exacting what are
vulgarly termed "tips" for services performed, and on the other there were
the various kinds of positive dishonesty. Though it might not be always
easy to draw a clear line between the two categories, the distinction was
fully recognised in the moral consciousness of the time, and many an
official who regularly received "sinless revenues" (bezgreshniye dokhodi),
as the tips were sometimes called, would have been very indignant had he
been stigmatised as a dishonest man. The practice was, in fact, universal,
and could be, to a certain extent, justified by the smallness of the official
salaries. In some departments there was a recognised tariff. The "brandy
farmers," for example, who worked the State Monopoly for the manufacture
and sale of alcoholic liquors, paid regularly a fixed sum to every official,

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from the Governor to the policeman, according to his rank. I knew of one
case where an official, on receiving a larger sum than was customary,
conscientiously handed back the change! The other and more heinous
offences were by no means so common, but were still fearfully frequent.
Many high officials and important dignitaries were known to receive large
revenues, to which the term "sinless" could not by any means be applied,
and yet they retained their position, and were received in society with
respectful deference.
The Sovereigns were well aware of the abuses, and strove more or less to
root them out, but the success which attended their efforts does not give us
a very exalted idea of the practical omnipotence of autocracy. In a
centralised bureaucratic administration, in which each official is to a certain
extent responsible for the sins of his subordinates, it is always extremely
difficult to bring an official culprit to justice, for he is sure to be protected
by his superiors; and when the superiors are themselves habitually guilty of
malpractices, the culprit is quite safe from exposure and punishment. The
Tsar, indeed, might do much towards exposing and punishing offenders if
he could venture to call in public opinion to his assistance, but in reality he
is very apt to become a party to the system of hushing up official
delinquencies. He is himself the first official in the realm, and he knows
that the abuse of power by a subordinate has a tendency to produce hostility
towards the fountain of all official power. Frequent punishment of officials
might, it is thought, diminish public respect for the Government, and
undermine that social discipline which is necessary for the public
tranquillity. It is therefore considered expedient to give to official
delinquencies as little publicity as possible.
Besides this, strange as it may seem, a Government which rests on the
arbitrary will of a single individual is, notwithstanding occasional outbursts
of severity, much less systematically severe than authority founded on free
public opinion. When delinquencies occur in very high places the Tsar is
almost sure to display a leniency approaching to tenderness. If it be
necessary to make a sacrifice to justice, the sacrificial operation is made as
painless as may be, and illustrious scapegoats are not allowed to die of
starvation in the wilderness—the wilderness being generally Paris or the
Riviera. This fact may seem strange to those who are in the habit of
associating autocracy with Neapolitan dungeons and the mines of Siberia,
but it is not difficult to explain. No individual, even though he be the

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Autocrat of all the Russias, can so case himself in the armour of official
dignity as to be completely proof against personal influences. The severity
of autocrats is reserved for political offenders, against whom they naturally
harbour a feeling of personal resentment. It is so much easier for us to be
lenient and charitable towards a man who sins against public morality than
towards one who sins against ourselves!
In justice to the bureaucratic reformers in Russia, it must be said that they
have preferred prevention to cure. Refraining from all Draconian
legislation, they have put their faith in a system of ingenious checks and a
complicated formal procedure. When we examine the complicated
formalities and labyrinthine procedure by which the administration is
controlled, our first impression is that administrative abuses must be almost
impossible. Every possible act of every official seems to have been
foreseen, and every possible outlet from the narrow path of honesty seems
to have been carefully walled up. As the English reader has probably no
conception of formal procedure in a highly centralised bureaucracy, let me
give, by way of illustration, an instance which accidentally came to my
knowledge.
In the residence of a Governor-General one of the stoves is in need of
repairs. An ordinary mortal may assume that a man with the rank of
Governor-General may be trusted to expend a few shillings conscientiously,
and that consequently his Excellency will at once order the repairs to be
made and the payment to be put down among the petty expenses. To the
bureaucratic mind the case appears in a very different light. All possible
contingencies must be carefully provided for. As a Governor-General may
possibly be possessed with a mania for making useless alterations, the
necessity for the repairs ought to be verified; and as wisdom and honesty
are more likely to reside in an assembly than in an individual, it is well to
entrust the verification to a council. A council of three or four members
accordingly certifies that the repairs are necessary. This is pretty strong
authority, but it is not enough. Councils are composed of mere human
beings, liable to error and subject to be intimidated by a Governor-General.
It is prudent, therefore, to demand that the decision of the council be
confirmed by the Procureur, who is directly subordinated to the Minister of
Justice. When this double confirmation has been obtained, an architect
examines the stove, and makes an estimate. But it would be dangerous to
give carte blanche to an architect, and therefore the estimate has to be

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confirmed, first by the aforesaid council and afterwards by the Procureur.
When all these formalities—which require sixteen days and ten sheets of
paper—have been duly observed, his Excellency is informed that the
contemplated repairs will cost two roubles and forty kopecks, or about five
shillings of our money. Even here the formalities do not stop, for the
Government must have the assurance that the architect who made the
estimate and superintended the repairs has not been guilty of negligence. A
second architect is therefore sent to examine the work, and his report, like
the estimate, requires to be confirmed by the council and the Procureur. The
whole correspondence lasts thirty days, and requires no less than thirty
sheets of paper! Had the person who desired the repairs been not a
Governor-General, but an ordinary mortal, it is impossible to say how long
the procedure might have lasted.*

* In fairness I feel constrained to add that incidents of
this kind occasionally occur—or at least occurred as late
as 1886—in our Indian Administration. I remember an
instance of a pane of glass being broken in the Viceroy's
bedroom in the Viceregal Lodge at Simla, and it would have
required nearly a week, if the official procedure had been
scrupulously observed, to have it replaced by the Public
Works Department.

It might naturally be supposed that this circuitous and complicated
method, with its registers, ledgers, and minutes of proceedings, must at least
prevent pilfering; but this a priori conclusion has been emphatically belied
by experience. Every new ingenious device had merely the effect of
producing a still more ingenious means of avoiding it. The system did not
restrain those who wished to pilfer, and it had a deleterious effect on honest
officials by making them feel that the Government reposed no confidence in
them. Besides this, it produced among all officials, honest and dishonest
alike, the habit of systematic falsification. As it was impossible for even the
most pedantic of men—and pedantry, be it remarked, is a rare quality
among Russians—to fulfil conscientiously all the prescribed formalities, it
became customary to observe the forms merely on paper. Officials certified
facts which they never dreamed of examining, and secretaries gravely wrote
the minutes of meetings that had never been held! Thus, in the case above
cited, the repairs were in reality begun and ended long before the architect
was officially authorised to begin the work. The comedy was nevertheless
gravely played out to the end, so that any one afterwards revising the

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documents would have found that everything had been done in perfect
order.
Perhaps the most ingenious means for preventing administrative abuses
was devised by the Emperor Nicholas I. Fully aware that he was regularly
and systematically deceived by the ordinary officials, he formed a body of
well-paid officers, called the gendarmerie, who were scattered over the
country, and ordered to report directly to his Majesty whatever seemed to
them worthy of attention. Bureaucratic minds considered this an admirable
expedient; and the Tsar confidently expected that he would, by means of
these official observers who had no interest in concealing the truth, be able
to know everything, and to correct all official abuses. In reality the
institution produced few good results, and in some respects had a very
pernicious influence. Though picked men and provided with good salaries,
these officers were all more or less permeated with the prevailing spirit.
They could not but feel that they were regarded as spies and informers—a
humiliating conviction, little calculated to develop that feeling of self-
respect which is the main foundation of uprightness—and that all their
efforts could do but little good. They were, in fact, in pretty much the same
position as Peter's Procurator-General, and, with true Russian bonhomie,
they disliked ruining individuals who were no worse than the majority of
their fellows. Besides this, according to the received code of official
morality insubordination was a more heinous sin than dishonesty, and
political offences were regarded as the blackest of all. The gendarmerie
officers shut their eyes, therefore, to the prevailing abuses, which were
believed to be incurable, and directed their attention to real or imaginary
political delinquencies. Oppression and extortion remained unnoticed,
whilst an incautious word or a foolish joke at the expense of the
Government was too often magnified into an act of high treason.
This force still exists under a slightly modified form. Towards the close
of the reign of Alexander II. (1880), when Count Loris Melikof, with the
sanction and approval of his august master, was preparing to introduce a
system of liberal political reforms, it was intended to abolish the
gendarmerie as an organ of political espionage, and accordingly the
direction of it was transferred from the so-called Third Section of his
Imperial Majesty's Chancery to the Ministry of the Interior; but when the
benevolent monarch was a few months afterwards assassinated by
revolutionists, the project was naturally abandoned, and the Corps of

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Gendarmes, while remaining nominally under the Minister of the Interior,
was practically reinstated in its former position. Now, as then, it serves as a
kind of supplement to the ordinary police, and is generally employed for
matters in which secrecy is required. Unfortunately it is not bound by those
legal restrictions which protect the public against the arbitrary will of the
ordinary authorities. In addition to its regular duties it has a vaguely defined
roving commission to watch and arrest all persons who seem to it in any
way dangerous or suspectes, and it may keep such in confinement for an
indefinite time, or remove them to some distant and inhospitable part of the
Empire, without making them undergo a regular trial. It is, in short, the
ordinary instrument for punishing political dreamers, suppressing secret
societies, counteracting political agitations, and in general executing the
extra-legal orders of the Government.
My relations with this anomalous branch of the administration were
somewhat peculiar. After my experience with the Vice-Governor of
Novgorod I determined to place myself above suspicion, and accordingly
applied to the "Chef des Gendarmes" for some kind of official document
which would prove to all officials with whom I might come in contact that I
had no illicit designs. My request was granted, and I was furnished with the
necessary documents; but I soon found that in seeking to avoid Scylla I had
fallen into Charybdis. In calming official suspicions, I inadvertently aroused
suspicions of another kind. The documents proving that I enjoyed the
protection of the Government made many people suspect that I was an
emissary of the gendarmerie, and greatly impeded me in my efforts to
collect information from private sources. As the private were for me more
important than the official sources of information, I refrained from asking
for a renewal of the protection, and wandered about the country as an
ordinary unprotected traveller. For some time I had no cause to regret this
decision. I knew that I was pretty closely watched, and that my letters were
occasionally opened in the post-office, but I was subjected to no further
inconvenience. At last, when I had nearly forgotten all about Scylla and
Charybdis, I one night unexpectedly ran upon the former, and, to my
astonishment, found myself formally arrested! The incident happened in
this wise.
I had been visiting Austria and Servia, and after a short absence returned
to Russia through Moldavia. On arriving at the Pruth, which there forms the
frontier, I found an officer of gendarmerie, whose duty it was to examine

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the passports of all passers-by. Though my passport was completely en
regle, having been duly vise by the British and Russian Consuls at Galatz,
this gentleman subjected me to a searching examination regarding my past
life, actual occupation, and intentions for the future. On learning that I had
been for more than two years travelling in Russia at my own expense, for
the simple purpose of collecting miscellaneous information, he looked
incredulous, and seemed to have some doubts as to my being a genuine
British subject; but when my statements were confirmed by my travelling
companion, a Russian friend who carried awe-inspiring credentials, he
countersigned my passport, and allowed us to depart. The inspection of our
luggage by the custom-house officers was soon got over; and as we drove
off to the neighbouring village where we were to spend the night we
congratulated ourselves on having escaped for some time from all contact
with the official world. In this we were "reckoning without the host." As the
clock struck twelve that night I was roused by a loud knocking at my door,
and after a good deal of parley, during which some one proposed to effect
an entrance by force, I drew the bolt. The officer who had signed my
passport entered, and said, in a stiff, official tone, "I must request you to
remain here for twenty-four hours."
Not a little astonished by this announcement, I ventured to inquire the
reason for this strange request.
"That is my business," was the laconic reply.
"Perhaps it is; still you must, on mature consideration, admit that I too
have some interest in the matter. To my extreme regret I cannot comply
with your request, and must leave at sunrise."
"You shall not leave. Give me your passport."
"Unless detained by force, I shall start at four o'clock; and as I wish to get
some sleep before that time, I must request you instantly to retire. You had
the right to stop me at the frontier, but you have no right to come and
disturb me in this fashion, and I shall certainly report you. My passport I
shall give to none but a regular officer of police."
Here followed a long discussion on the rights, privileges, and general
character of the gendarmerie, during which my opponent gradually laid
aside his dictatorial tone, and endeavoured to convince me that the
honourable body to which he belonged was merely an ordinary branch of
the administration. Though evidently irritated, he never, I must say,

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overstepped the bounds of politeness, and seemed only half convinced that
he was justified in interfering with my movements. When he found that he
could not induce me to give up my passport, he withdrew, and I again lay
down to rest; but in about half an hour I was again disturbed. This time an
officer of regular police entered, and demanded my "papers." To my
inquiries as to the reason of all this disturbance, he replied, in a very polite,
apologetic way, that he knew nothing about the reason, but he had received
orders to arrest me, and must obey. To him I delivered my passport, on
condition that I should receive a written receipt, and should be allowed to
telegraph to the British ambassador in St. Petersburg.
Early next morning I telegraphed to the ambassador, and waited
impatiently all day for a reply. I was allowed to walk about the village and
the immediate vicinity, but of this permission I did not make much use. The
village population was entirely Jewish, and Jews in that part of the world
have a wonderful capacity for spreading intelligence. By the early morning
there was probably not a man, woman, or child in the place who had not
heard of my arrest, and many of them felt a not unnatural curiosity to see
the malefactor who had been caught by the police. To be stared at as a
malefactor is not very agreeable, so I preferred to remain in my room,
where, in the company of my friend, who kindly remained with me and
made small jokes about the boasted liberty of British subjects, I spent the
time pleasantly enough. The most disagreeable part of the affair was the
uncertainty as to how many days, weeks, or months I might be detained,
and on this point the police-officer would not even hazard a conjecture.
The detention came to an end sooner than I expected. On the following
day—that is to say, about thirty-six hours after the nocturnal visit—the
police-officer brought me my passport, and at the same time a telegram
from the British Embassy informed me that the central authorities had
ordered my release. On my afterwards pertinaciously requesting an
explanation of the unceremonious treatment to which I had been subjected,
the Minister for Foreign Affairs declared that the authorities expected a
person of my name to cross the frontier about that time with a quantity of
false bank-notes, and that I had been arrested by mistake. I must confess
that this explanation, though official, seemed to me more ingenious than
satisfactory, but I was obliged to accept it for what it was worth. At a later
period I had again the misfortune to attract the attention of the secret police,

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but I reserve the incident till I come to speak of my relations with the
revolutionists.
From all I have seen and heard of the gendarmerie I am disposed to
believe that the officers are for the most part polite, well-educated men,
who seek to fulfil their disagreeable duties in as inoffensive a way as
possible. It must, however, be admitted that they are generally regarded
with suspicion and dislike, even by those people who fear the attempts at
revolutionary propaganda which it is the special duty of the gendarmerie to
discover and suppress. Nor need this surprise us. Though very many people
believe in the necessity of capital punishment, there are few who do not feel
a decided aversion to the public executioner.
The only effectual remedy for administrative abuses lies in placing the
administration under public control. This has been abundantly proved in
Russia. All the efforts of the Tsars during many generations to check the
evil by means of ingenious bureaucratic devices proved utterly fruitless.
Even the iron will and gigantic energy of Nicholas I. were insufficient for
the task. But when, after the Crimean War, there was a great moral
awakening, and the Tsar called the people to his assistance, the stubborn,
deep-rooted evils immediately disappeared. For a time venality and
extortion were unknown, and since that period they have never been able to
regain their old force.
At the present moment it cannot be said that the administration is
immaculate, but it is incomparably purer than it was in old times. Though
public opinion is no longer so powerful as it was in the early sixties, it is
still strong enough to repress many malpractices which in the time of
Nicholas I. and his predecessors were too frequent to attract attention. On
this subject I shall have more to say hereafter.
If administrative abuses are rife in the Empire of the Tsars, it is not from
any want of carefully prepared laws. In no country in the world, perhaps, is
the legislation more voluminous, and in theory, not only the officials, but
even the Tsar himself, must obey the laws he has sanctioned, like the
meanest of his subjects. This is one of those cases, not infrequent in Russia,
in which theory differs somewhat from practice. In real life the Emperor
may at any moment override the law by means of what is called a Supreme
Command (vysotchaishiye povelenie), and a minister may "interpret" a law
in any way he pleases by means of a circular. This is a frequent cause of

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complaint even among those who wish to uphold the Autocratic Power. In
their opinion law-respecting autocracy wielded by a strong Tsar is an
excellent institution for Russia; it is arbitrary autocracy wielded by
irresponsible ministers that they object to.
As Englishmen may have some difficulty in imagining how laws can
come into being without a Parliament or Legislative Chamber of some sort,
I shall explain briefly how they are manufactured by the Russian
bureaucratic machine without the assistance of representative institutions.
When a minister considers that some institution in his branch of the
service requires to be reformed, he begins by submitting to the Emperor a
formal report on the matter. If the Emperor agrees with his minister as to the
necessity for reform, he orders a Commission to be appointed for the
purpose of considering the subject and preparing a definite legislative
project. The Commission meets and sets to work in what seems a very
thorough way. It first studies the history of the institution in Russia from the
earliest times downwards—or rather, it listens to an essay on the subject,
especially prepared for the occasion by some official who has a taste for
historical studies, and can write in a pleasant style. The next step—to use a
phrase which often occurs in the minutes of such commissions—consists in
"shedding the light of science on the question" (prolit' na dyelo svet nauki).
This important operation is performed by preparing a memorial containing
the history of similar institutions in foreign countries, and an elaborate
exposition of numerous theories held by French and German philosophical
jurists. In these memorials it is often considered necessary to include every
European country except Turkey, and sometimes the small German States
and principal Swiss cantons are treated separately.
To illustrate the character of these wonderful productions, let me give an
example. From a pile of such papers lying before me I take one almost at
random. It is a memorial relating to a proposed reform of benevolent
institutions. First I find a philosophical disquisition on benevolence in
general; next, some remarks on the Talmud and the Koran; then a reference
to the treatment of paupers in Athens after the Peloponnesian War, and in
Rome under the emperors: then some vague observations on the Middle
Ages, with a quotation that was evidently intended to be Latin; lastly,
comes an account of the poor-laws of modern times, in which I meet with
"the Anglo-Saxon domination," King Egbert, King Ethelred, "a remarkable

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book of Icelandic laws, called Hragas"; Sweden and Norway, France,
Holland, Belgium, Prussia, and nearly all the minor German States. The
most wonderful thing is that all this mass of historical information,
extending from the Talmud to the most recent legislation of Hesse-
Darmstadt, is compressed into twenty-one octavo pages! The doctrinal part
of the memorandum is not less rich. Many respected names from the
literature of Germany, France, and England are forcibly dragged in; and the
general conclusion drawn from this mass of raw, undigested materials is
believed to be "the latest results of science."
Does the reader suspect that I have here chosen an extremely exceptional
case? If so, let us take the next paper in the file. It refers to a project of law
regarding imprisonment for debt. On the first page I find references to "the
Salic laws of the fifth century," and the "Assises de Jerusalem, A.D 1099."
That, I think, will suffice. Let us pass, then, to the next step.
When the quintessence of human wisdom and experience has thus been
extracted, the commission considers how the valuable product may be
applied to Russia, so as to harmonise with the existing general conditions
and local peculiarities. For a man of practical mind this is, of course, the
most interesting and most important part of the operation, but from Russian
legislators it receives comparatively little attention. Very often have I turned
to this section of official papers in order to obtain information regarding the
actual state of the country, and in every case I have been grievously
disappointed. Vague general phrases, founded on a priori reasoning rather
than on observation, together with a few statistical tables—which the
cautious investigator should avoid as he would an ambuscade—are too
often all that is to be found. Through the thin veil of pseudo-erudition the
real facts are clear enough. These philosophical legislators, who have spent
their lives in the official atmosphere of St. Petersburg, know as much about
Russia as the genuine cockney knows about Great Britain, and in this part
of their work they derive no assistance from the learned German treatises
which supply an unlimited amount of historical facts and philosophical
speculation.
From the commission the project passes to the Council of State, where it
is certainly examined and criticised, and perhaps modified, but it is not
likely to be improved from the practical point of view, because the members
of the Council are merely ci-devant members of similar commissions,

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hardened by a few additional years of official routine. The Council is, in
fact, an assembly of tchinovniks who know little of the practical, everyday
wants of the unofficial classes. No merchant, manufacturer, or farmer ever
enters its sacred precincts, so that its bureaucratic serenity is rarely
disturbed by practical objections. It is not surprising, therefore, that it has
been known to pass laws which were found at once to be absolutely
unworkable.
From the Council of State the Bill is taken to the Emperor, and he
generally begins by examining the signatures. The "Ayes" are in one
column and the "Noes" in another. If his Majesty is not specially acquainted
with the matter—and he cannot possibly be acquainted with all the matters
submitted to him—he usually signs with the majority, or on the side where
he sees the names of officials in whose judgment he has special confidence;
but if he has strong views of his own, he places his signature in whichever
column he thinks fit, and it outweighs the signatures of any number of
Councillors. Whatever side he supports, that side "has it," and in this way a
small minority may be transformed into a majority. When the important
question, for example, as to how far classics should be taught in the
ordinary schools was considered by the Council, it is said that only two
members signed in favour of classical education, which was excessively
unpopular at the moment, but the Emperor Alexander III., disregarding
public opinion and the advice of his Councillors, threw his signature into
the lighter scale, and the classicists were victorious.

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Page 389

CHAPTER XXV
MOSCOW AND THE SLAVOPHILS

Two Ancient Cities—Kief Not a Good Point for Studying Old Russian
National Life—Great Russians and Little Russians—Moscow—Easter Eve
in the Kremlin—Curious Custom—Anecdote of the Emperor Nicholas—
Domiciliary Visits of the Iberian Madonna—The Streets of Moscow—
Recent Changes in the Character of the City—Vulgar Conception of the
Slavophils—Opinion Founded on Personal Acquaintance—Slavophil
Sentiment a Century Ago—Origin and Development of the Slavophil
Doctrine—Slavophilism Essentially Muscovite—The Panslavist Element—
The Slavophils and the Emancipation.
In the last chapter, as in many of the preceding ones, the reader must
have observed that at one moment there was a sudden break, almost a
solution of continuity, in Russian national life. The Tsardom of Muscovy,
with its ancient Oriental costumes and Byzantine traditions, unexpectedly
disappears, and the Russian Empire, clad in modern garb and animated with
the spirit of modern progress, steps forward uninvited into European
history. Of the older civilisation, if civilisation it can be called, very little
survived the political transformation, and that little is generally supposed to
hover ghostlike around Kief and Moscow. To one or other of these towns,
therefore, the student who desires to learn something of genuine old
Russian life, untainted by foreign influences, naturally wends his way. For
my part I thought first of settling for a time in Kief, the oldest and most
revered of Russian cities, where missionaries from Byzantium first planted
Christianity on Russian soil, and where thousands of pilgrims still assemble
yearly from far and near to prostrate themselves before the Holy Icons in
the churches and to venerate the relics of the blessed saints and martyrs in
the catacombs of the great monastery. I soon discovered, however, that
Kief, though it represents in a certain sense the Byzantine traditions so dear
to the Russian people, is not a good point of observation for studying the
Russian character. It was early exposed to the ravages of the nomadic tribes
of the Steppe, and when it was liberated from those incursions it was seized

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by the Poles and Lithuanians, and remained for centuries under their
domination. Only in comparatively recent times did it begin to recover its
Russian character—a university having been created there for that purpose
after the Polish insurrection of 1830. Even now the process of Russification
is far from complete, and the Russian elements in the population are far
from being pure in the nationalist sense. The city and the surrounding
country are, in fact, Little Russian rather than Great Russian, and between
these two sections of the population there are profound differences—
differences of language, costume, traditions, popular songs, proverbs, folk-
lore, domestic arrangements, mode of life, and Communal organisation. In
these and other respects the Little Russians, South Russians, Ruthenes, or
Khokhly, as they are variously designated, differ from the Great Russians of
the North, who form the predominant factor in the Empire, and who have
given to that wonderful structure its essential characteristics. Indeed, if I did
not fear to ruffle unnecessarily the patriotic susceptibilities of my Great
Russian friends who have a pet theory on this subject, I should say that we
have here two distinct nationalities, further apart from each other than the
English and the Scotch. The differences are due, I believe, partly to
ethnographical peculiarities and partly to historic conditions.
As it was the energetic Great Russian empire-builders and not the half-
dreamy, half-astute, sympathetic descendants of the Free Cossacks that I
wanted to study, I soon abandoned my idea of settling in the Holy City on
the Dnieper, and chose Moscow as my point of observation; and here,
during several years, I spent regularly some of the winter months.
The first few weeks of my stay in the ancient capital of the Tsars were
spent in the ordinary manner of intelligent tourists. After mastering the
contents of a guide-book I carefully inspected all the officially recognised
objects of interest—the Kremlin, with its picturesque towers and six
centuries of historical associations; the Cathedrals, containing the venerated
tombs of martyrs, saints, and Tsars; the old churches, with their quaint,
archaic, richly decorated Icons; the "Patriarchs' Treasury," rich in jewelled
ecclesiastical vestments and vessels of silver and gold; the ancient and the
modern palace; the Ethnological Museum, showing the costumes and
physiognomy of all the various races in the Empire; the archaeological
collections, containing many objects that recall the barbaric splendour of
old Muscovy; the picture-gallery, with Ivanof's gigantic picture, in which
patriotic Russian critics discover occult merits which place it above

Page 391

anything that Western Europe has yet produced! Of course I climbed up to
the top of the tall belfry which rejoices in the name of "Ivan the Great," and
looked down on the "gilded domes"* of the churches, and bright green
roofs of the houses, and far away, beyond these, the gently undulating
country with the "Sparrow Hills," from which Napoleon is said, in cicerone
language, to have "gazed upon the doomed city." Occasionally I walked
about the bazaars in the hope of finding interesting specimens of genuine
native art-industry, and was urgently invited to purchase every conceivable
article which I did not want. At midday or in the evening I visited the most
noted traktirs, and made the acquaintance of the caviar, sturgeons, sterlets,
and other native delicacies for which these institutions are famous—
deafened the while by the deep tones of the colossal barrel-organ, out of all
proportion to the size of the room; and in order to see how the common
people spent their evenings I looked in at some of the more modest traktirs,
and gazed with wonder, not unmixed with fear, at the enormous quantity of
weak tea which the inmates consumed.

* Allowance must be made here for poetical licence. In
reality, very few of the domes are gilt. The great majority
of them are painted green, like the roofs of the houses.

Since these first weeks of my sojourn in Moscow more than thirty years
have passed, and many of my early impressions have been blurred by time,
but one scene remains deeply graven on my memory. It was Easter Eve, and
I had gone with a friend to the Kremlin to witness the customary religious
ceremonies. Though the rain was falling heavily, an immense number of
people had assembled in and around the Cathedral of the Assumption. The
crowd was of the most mixed kind. There stood the patient bearded muzhik
in his well-worn sheepskin; the big, burly, self-satisfied merchant in his
long black glossy kaftan; the noble with fashionable great-coat and
umbrella; thinly clad old women shivering in the cold, and bright-eyed
young damsels with their warm cloaks drawn closely round them; old men
with long beard, wallet, and pilgrim's staff; and mischievous urchins with
faces for the moment preternaturally demure. Each right hand, of old and
young alike, held a lighted taper, and these myriads of flickering little
flames produced a curious illumination, giving to the surrounding buildings
a weird picturesqueness which they do not possess in broad daylight. All
stood patiently waiting for the announcement of the glad tidings: "He is
risen!" As midnight approached, the hum of voices gradually ceased, till, as

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the clock struck twelve, the deep-toned bell on "Ivan the Great" began to
toll, and in answer to this signal all the bells in Moscow suddenly sent forth
a merry peal. Each bell—and their name is legion—seemed frantically
desirous of drowning its neighbour's voice, the solemn boom of the great
one overhead mingling curiously with the sharp, fussy "ting-a-ting-ting" of
diminutive rivals. If demons dwell in Moscow and dislike bell-ringing, as is
generally supposed, then there must have been at that moment a general
stampede of the powers of darkness such as is described by Milton in his
poem on the Nativity, and as if this deafening din were not enough, big
guns were fired in rapid succession from a battery of artillery close at hand!
The noise seemed to stimulate the religious enthusiasm, and the general
excitement had a wonderful effect on a Russian friend who accompanied
me. When in his normal condition that gentleman was a quiet,
undemonstrative person, devoted to science, an ardent adherent of Western
civilisation in general and of Darwinism in particular, and a thorough
sceptic with regard to all forms of religious belief; but the influence of the
surroundings was too much for his philosophical equanimity. For a moment
his orthodox Muscovite soul awoke from its sceptical, cosmopolitan
lethargy. After crossing himself repeatedly—an act of devotion which I had
never before seen him perform—he grasped my arm, and, pointing to the
crowd, said in an exultant tone of voice, "Look there! There is a sight that
you can see nowhere but in the 'White-stone City.'* Are not the Russians a
religious people?"

*Belokamenny, meaning "of white stone," is one of the
popular names of Moscow.

To this unexpected question I gave a monosyllabic assent, and refrained
from disturbing my friend's new-born enthusiasm by any discordant note;
but I must confess that this sudden outburst of deafening noise and the
dazzling light aroused in my heretical breast feelings of a warlike rather
than a religious kind. For a moment I could imagine myself in ancient
Moscow, and could fancy the people being called out to repel a Tartar horde
already thundering at the gates!
The service lasted two or three hours, and terminated with the curious
ceremony of blessing the Easter cakes, which were ranged—each one with
a lighted taper stuck in it—in long rows outside of the cathedral. A not less
curious custom practised at this season is that of exchanging kisses of

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fraternal love. Theoretically one ought to embrace and be embraced by all
present—indicating thereby that all are brethren in Christ—but the
refinements of modern life have made innovations in the practice, and most
people confine their salutations to their friends and acquaintances. When
two friends meet during that night or on the following day, the one says,
"Christos voskres!" ("Christ hath risen!"); and the other replies, "Vo istine
voskres!" ("In truth he hath risen!"). They then kiss each other three times
on the right and left cheek alternately. The custom is more or less observed
in all classes of society, and the Emperor himself conforms to it.
This reminds me of an anecdote which is related of the Emperor Nicholas
I., tending to show that he was not so devoid of kindly human feelings as
his imperial and imperious exterior suggested. On coming out of his cabinet
one Easter morning he addressed to the soldier who was mounting guard at
the door the ordinary words of salutation, "Christ hath risen!" and received
instead of the ordinary reply, a flat contradiction—"Not at all, your Imperial
Majesty!" Astounded by such an unexpected answer—for no one ventured
to dissent from Nicholas even in the most guarded and respectful terms—he
instantly demanded an explanation. The soldier, trembling at his own
audacity, explained that he was a Jew, and could not conscientiously admit
the fact of the Resurrection. This boldness for conscience' sake so pleased
the Tsar that he gave the man a handsome Easter present.
A quarter of a century after the Easter Eve above mentioned—or, to be
quite accurate, on the 26th of May, 1896—I again find myself in the
Kremlin on the occasion of a great religious ceremony—a ceremony which
shows that "the White-stone City" on the Moskva is still in some respects
the capital of Holy Russia. This time my post of observation is inside the
cathedral, which is artistically draped with purple hangings and crowded
with the most distinguished personages of the Empire, all arrayed in
gorgeous apparel—Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses, Imperial
Highnesses and High Excellencies, Metropolitans and Archbishops,
Senators and Councillors of State, Generals and Court dignitaries. In the
centre of the building, on a high, richly decorated platform, sits the Emperor
with his Imperial Consort, and his mother, the widowed Consort of
Alexander III. Though Nicholas II. has not the colossal stature which has
distinguished so many of the Romanofs, he is well built, holds himself
erect, and shows a quiet dignity in his movements; while his face, which
resembles that of his cousin, the Prince of Wales, wears a kindly,

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sympathetic expression. The Empress looks even more than usually
beautiful, in a low dress cut in the ancient fashion, her thick brown hair,
dressed most simply without jewellery or other ornaments, falling in two
long ringlets over her white shoulders. For the moment, her attire is much
simpler than that of the Empress Dowager, who wears a diamond crown and
a great mantle of gold brocade, lined and edged with ermine, the long train
displaying in bright-coloured embroidery the heraldic double-headed eagle
of the Imperial arms.
Each of these august personages sits on a throne of curious workmanship,
consecrated by ancient historic associations. That of the Emperor, the gift of
the Shah of Persia to Ivan the Terrible, and commonly called the Throne of
Tsar Michael, the founder of the Romanof dynasty, is covered with gold
plaques, and studded with hundreds of big, roughly cut precious stones,
mostly rubies, emeralds, and turquoises. Of still older date is the throne of
the young Empress, for it was given by Pope Paul II. to Tsar Ivan III.,
grandfather of the Terrible, on the occasion of his marriage with a niece of
the last Byzantine Emperor. More recent but not less curious is that of the
Empress Dowager. It is the throne of Tsar Alexis, the father of Peter the
Great, covered with countless and priceless diamonds, rubies, and pearls,
and surmounted by an Imperial eagle of solid gold, together with golden
statuettes of St. Peter and St. Nicholas, the miracle-worker. Over each
throne is a canopy of purple velvet fringed with gold, out of which rise
stately plumes representing the national colours.
Their Majesties have come hither, in accordance with time-honoured
custom, to be crowned in this old Cathedral of the Assumption, the central
point of the Kremlin, within a stone-throw of the Cathedral of the
Archangel Michael, in which lie the remains of the old Grand Dukes and
Tsars of Muscovy. Already the Emperor has read aloud, in a clear,
unfaltering voice, from a richly bound parchment folio, held by the
Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, the Orthodox creed; and his Eminence, after
invoking on his Majesty the blessing of the Holy Spirit, has performed the
mystic rite of placing his hands in the form of a cross on the Imperial
forehead. Thus all is ready for the most important part of the solemn
ceremony. Standing erect, the Emperor doffs his small diadem and puts on
with his own hands the great diamond crown, offered respectfully by the
Metropolitan; then he reseats himself on his throne, holding in his right
hand the Sceptre and in his left the Orb of Dominion. After sitting thus in

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state for a few minutes, he stands up and proceeds to crown his august
spouse, kneeling before him. First he touches her forehead with his own
crown, and then he places on her head a smaller one, which is immediately
attached to her hair by four ladies-in-waiting, dressed in the old Muscovite
Court-costume. At the same time her Majesty is invested with a mantle of
heavy gold brocade, similar to those of the Emperor and Empress Dowager,
lined and bordered with ermine.
Thus crowned and robed their Majesties sit in state, while a proto-deacon
reads, in a loud stentorian voice, the long list of sonorous hereditary titles
belonging of right to the Imperator and Autocrat of all the Russias, and the
choir chants a prayer invoking long life and happiness—"Many years!
Many years! Many years!"—on the high and mighty possessor of the titles
aforesaid. And now begins the Mass, celebrated with a pomp and
magnificence that can be witnessed only once or twice in a generation.
Sixty gorgeously robed ecclesiastical dignitaries of the highest orders fulfil
their various functions with due solemnity and unction; but the
magnificence of the vestments and the pomp of the ceremonial are soon
forgotten in the exquisite solemnising music, as the deep double-bass tones
of the adult singers in the background—carefully selected for the occasion
in all parts of the Empire—peal forth as from a great organ, and blend
marvellously with the clear, soft, gentle notes of the red-robed chorister
boys in front of the Iconostase. Listening with intense emotion, I
involuntarily recall to mind Fra Angelico's pictures of angelic choirs, and
cannot help thinking that the pious old Florentine, whose soul was attuned
to all that was sacred and beautiful, must have heard in imagination such
music as this. So strong is the impression that the subsequent details of the
long ceremony, including the anointing with the holy chrism, fail to engrave
themselves on my memory. One incident, however, remains; and if it had
happened in an earlier and more superstitious age it would doubtless have
been chronicled as an omen full of significance. As the Emperor is on the
point of descending from the dais, duly crowned and anointed, a staggering
ray of sunshine steals through one of the narrow upper windows and,
traversing the dimly lit edifice, falls full on the Imperial crown, lighting up
for a moment the great mass of diamonds with a hundredfold brilliance.
In a detailed account of the Coronation which I wrote on leaving the
Kremlin, I find the following: "The magnificent ceremony is at an end, and
now Nicholas II. is the crowned Emperor and anointed Autocrat of all the

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Russias. May the cares of Empire rest lightly on him! That must be the
earnest prayer of every loyal subject and every sincere well-wisher, for of
all living mortals he is perhaps the one who has been entrusted by
Providence with the greatest power and the greatest responsibilities." In
writing those words I did not foresee how heavy his responsibilities would
one day weigh upon him, when his Empire would be sorely tried, by foreign
war and internal discontent.
One more of these old Moscow reminiscences, and I have done. A day or
two after the Coronation I saw the Khodinskoye Polye, a great plain in the
outskirts of Moscow, strewn with hundreds of corpses! During the previous
night enormous crowds from the city and the surrounding districts had
collected here in order to receive at sunrise, by the Tsar's command, a little
memento of the coronation ceremony, in the form of a packet containing a
metal cup and a few eatables; and as day dawned, in their anxiety to get
near the row of booths from which the distribution was to be made, about
two thousand had been crushed to death. It was a sight more horrible than a
battlefield, because among the dead were a large proportion of women and
children, terribly mutilated in the struggle. Altogether, "a sight to shudder
at, not to see!"
To return to the remark of my friend in the Kremlin on Easter Eve, the
Russians in general, and the Muscovites in particular, as the quintessence of
all that is Russian, are certainly a religious people, but their piety
sometimes finds modes of expression which rather shock the Protestant
mind. As an instance of these, I may mention the domiciliary visits of the
Iberian Madonna. This celebrated Icon, for reasons which I have never
heard satisfactorily explained, is held in peculiar veneration by the
Muscovites, and occupies in popular estimation a position analogous to the
tutelary deities of ancient pagan cities. Thus when Napoleon was about to
enter the city in 1812, the populace clamorously called upon the
Metropolitan to take the Madonna, and lead them out armed with hatchets
against the hosts of the infidel; and when the Tsar visits Moscow he
generally drives straight from the railway-station to the little chapel where
the Icon resides—near one of the entrances to the Kremlin—and there
offers up a short prayer. Every Orthodox Russian, as he passes this chapel,
uncovers and crosses himself, and whenever a religious service is
performed in it there is always a considerable group of worshippers. Some
of the richer inhabitants, however, are not content with thus performing

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their devotions in public before the Icon. They like to have it from time to
time in their houses, and the ecclesiastical authorities think fit to humour
this strange fancy. Accordingly every morning the Iberian Madonna may be
seen driving about the city from one house to another in a carriage and four!
The carriage may be at once recognised, not from any peculiarity in its
structure, for it is an ordinary close carriage such as may be obtained at
livery stables, but by the fact that the coachman sits bare-headed, and all the
people in the street uncover and cross themselves as it passes. Arrived at the
house to which it has been invited, the Icon is carried through all the rooms,
and in the principal apartment a short religious service is performed before
it. As it is being brought in or taken away, female servants may sometimes
be seen to kneel on the floor so that it may be carried over them. During its
absence from its chapel it is replaced by a copy not easily distinguishable
from the original, and thus the devotions of the faithful and the flow of
pecuniary contributions do not suffer interruption. These contributions,
together with the sums paid for the domiciliary visits, amount to a
considerable yearly sum, and go—if I am rightly informed—to swell the
revenues of the Metropolitan.
A single drive or stroll through Moscow will suffice to convince the
traveller, even if he knows nothing of Russian history, that the city is not,
like its modern rival on the Neva, the artificial creation of a far-seeing, self-
willed autocrat, but rather a natural product which has grown up slowly and
been modified according to the constantly changing wants of the
population. A few of the streets have been Europeanised—in all except the
paving, which is everywhere execrably Asiatic—to suit the tastes of those
who have adopted European culture, but the great majority of them still
retain much of their ancient character and primitive irregularity. As soon as
we diverge from the principal thoroughfares, we find one-storied houses—
some of them still of wood—which appear to have been transported bodily
from the country, with courtyard, garden, stables, and other appurtenances.
The whole is no doubt a little compressed, for land has here a certain value,
but the character is in no way changed, and we have some difficulty in
believing that we are not in the suburbs but near the centre of a great town.
There is nothing that can by any possibility be called street architecture.
Though there is unmistakable evidence of the streets having been laid out
according to a preconceived plan, many of them show clearly that in their
infancy they had a wayward will of their own, and bent to the right or left

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without any topographical justification. The houses, too, display
considerable individuality of character, having evidently during the course
of their construction paid no attention to their neighbours. Hence we find no
regularly built terraces, crescents, or squares. There is, it is true, a double
circle of boulevards, but the houses which flank them have none of that
regularity which we commonly associate with the term. Dilapidated
buildings which in West-European cities would hide themselves in some
narrow lane or back slum here stand composedly in the face of day by the
side of a palatial residence, without having the least consciousness of the
incongruity of their position, just as the unsophisticated muzhik, in his
unsavoury sheepskin, can stand in the midst of a crowd of well-dressed
people without feeling at all awkward or uncomfortable.
All this incongruity, however, is speedily disappearing. Moscow has
become the centre of a great network of railways, and the commercial and
industrial capital of the Empire. Already her rapidly increasing population
has nearly reached a million.* The value of land and property is being
doubled and trebled, and building speculations, with the aid of credit
institutions of various kinds, are being carried on with feverish rapidity.
Well may the men of the old school complain that the world is turned
upside down, and regret the old times of traditional somnolence and
comfortable routine! Those good old times are gone now, never to return.
The ancient capital, which long gloried in its past historical associations,
now glories in its present commercial prosperity, and looks forward with
confidence to the future. Even the Slavophils, the obstinate champions of
the ultra-Muscovite spirit, have changed with the times, and descended to
the level of ordinary prosaic life. These men, who formerly spent years in
seeking to determine the place of Moscow in the past and future history of
humanity, have—to their honour be it said—become in these latter days
town-counsellors, and have devoted much of their time to devising ways
and means of improving the drainage and the street-paving! But I am
anticipating in a most unjustifiable way. I ought first to tell the reader who
these Slavophils were, and why they sought to correct the commonly
received conceptions of universal history.

* According to the census of 1897 it was 988,610.

The reader may have heard of the Slavophils as a set of fanatics who,
about half a century ago, were wont to go about in what they considered the

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ancient Russian costume, who wore beards in defiance of Peter the Great's
celebrated ukaz and Nicholas's clearly-expressed wish anent shaving, who
gloried in Muscovite barbarism, and had solemnly "sworn a feud" against
European civilisation and enlightenment. By the tourists of the time who
visited Moscow they were regarded as among the most noteworthy lions of
the place, and were commonly depicted in not very flattering colours. At the
beginning of the Crimean War they were among the extreme Chauvinists
who urged the necessity of planting the Greek cross on the desecrated dome
of St. Sophia in Constantinople, and hoped to see the Emperor proclaimed
"Panslavonic Tsar"; and after the termination of the war they were
frequently accused of inventing Turkish atrocities, stirring up discontent
among the Slavonic subjects of the Sultan, and secretly plotting for the
overthrow of the Ottoman Empire. All this was known to me before I went
to Russia, and I had consequently invested the Slavophils with a halo of
romance. Shortly after my arrival in St. Petersburg I heard something more
which tended to increase my interest in them—they had caused, I was told,
great trepidation among the highest official circles by petitioning the
Emperor to resuscitate a certain ancient institution, called Zemskiye Sobory,
which might be made to serve the purposes of a parliament! This threw a
new light upon them—under the disguise of archaeological conservatives
they were evidently aiming at important liberal reforms.
As a foreigner and a heretic, I expected a very cold and distant reception
from these uncompromising champions of Russian nationality and the
Orthodox faith; but in this I was agreeably disappointed. By all of them I
was received in the most amiable and friendly way, and I soon discovered
that my preconceived ideas of them were very far from the truth. Instead of
wild fanatics I found quiet, extremely intelligent, highly educated
gentlemen, speaking foreign languages with ease and elegance, and deeply
imbued with that Western culture which they were commonly supposed to
despise. And this first impression was amply confirmed by subsequent
experience during several years of friendly intercourse. They always
showed themselves men of earnest character and strong convictions, but
they never said or did anything that could justify the appellation of fanatics.
Like all philosophical theorists, they often allowed their logic to blind them
to facts, but their reasonings were very plausible—so plausible, indeed,
that, had I been a Russian they would have almost persuaded me to be a
Slavophil, at least during the time they were talking to me.

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To understand their doctrine we must know something of its origin and
development.
The origin of the Slavophil sentiment, which must not be confounded
with the Slavophil doctrine, is to be sought in the latter half of the
seventeenth century, when the Tsars of Muscovy were introducing
innovations in Church and State. These innovations were profoundly
displeasing to the people. A large portion of the lower classes, as I have
related in a previous chapter, sought refuge in Old Ritualism or
sectarianism, and imagined that Tsar Peter, who called himself by the
heretical title of "Imperator," was an emanation of the Evil Principle. The
nobles did not go quite so far. They remained members of the official
Church, and restricted themselves to hinting that Peter was the son, not of
Satan, but of a German surgeon—a lineage which, according to the
conceptions of the time, was a little less objectionable; but most of them
were very hostile to the changes, and complained bitterly of the new
burdens which these changes entailed. Under Peter's immediate successors,
when not only the principles of administration but also many of the
administrators were German, this hostility greatly increased.
So long as the innovations appeared only in the official activity of the
Government, the patriotic, conservative spirit was obliged to keep silence;
but when the foreign influence spread to the social life of the Court
aristocracy, the opposition began to find a literary expression. In the time of
Catherine II., when Gallomania was at its height in Court circles, comedies
and satirical journals ridiculed those who, "blinded by some externally
brilliant gifts of foreigners, not only prefer foreign countries to their native
land, but even despise their fellow-countrymen, and think that a Russian
ought to borrow all—even personal character. As if nature arranging all
things with such wisdom, and bestowing on all regions the gifts and
customs which are appropriate to the climate, had been so unjust as to
refuse to the Russians a character of their own! As if she condemned them
to wander over all regions, and to adopt by bits the various customs of
various nations, in order to compose out of the mixture a new character
appropriate to no nation whatever!" Numerous passages of this kind might
be quoted, attacking the "monkeyism" and "parrotism" of those who
indiscriminately adopted foreign manners and customs—those who

"Sauntered Europe round,

Page 401

And gathered ev'ry vice in ev'ry ground."

Sometimes the terms and metaphors employed were more forcible than
refined. One satirical journal, for instance, relates an amusing story about
certain little Russian pigs that went to foreign lands to enlighten their
understanding, and came back to their country full-grown swine. The
national pride was wounded by the thought that Russians could be called
"clever apes who feed on foreign intelligence," and many writers, stung by
such reproaches, fell into the opposite extreme, discovering unheard-of
excellences in the Russian mind and character, and vociferously decrying
everything foreign in order to place these imagined excellences in a
stronger light by contrast. Even when they recognised that their country was
not quite so advanced in civilisation as certain other nations, they
congratulated themselves on the fact, and invented by way of justification
an ingenious theory, which was afterwards developed by the Slavophils.
"The nations of the West," they said, "began to live before us, and are
consequently more advanced than we are; but we have on that account no
reason to envy them, for we can profit by their errors, and avoid those deep-
rooted evils from which they are suffering. He who has just been born is
happier than he who is dying."
Thus, we see, a patriotic reaction against the introduction of foreign
institutions and the inordinate admiration of foreign culture already existed
in Russia more than a century ago. It did not, however, take the form of a
philosophical theory till a much later period, when a similar movement was
going on in various countries of Western Europe.
After the overthrow of the great Napoleonic Empire a reaction against
cosmopolitanism took place and a romantic enthusiasm for nationality
spread over Europe like an epidemic. Blind, enthusiastic patriotism became
the fashionable sentiment of the time. Each nation took to admiring itself
complacently, to praising its own character and achievements, and to
idealising its historical and mythical past. National peculiarities, "local
colour," ancient customs, traditional superstitions—in short, everything that
a nation believed to be specially and exclusively its own, now raised an
enthusiasm similar to that which had been formerly excited by
cosmopolitan conceptions founded on the law of nature. The movement
produced good and evil results. In serious minds it led to a deep and
conscientious study of history, national literature, popular mythology, and
the like; whilst in frivolous, inflammable spirits it gave birth merely to a

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torrent of patriotic fervour and rhetorical exaggeration. The Slavophils were
the Russian representatives of this nationalistic reaction, and displayed both
its serious and its frivolous elements.
Among the most important products of this movement in Germany was
the Hegelian theory of universal history. According to Hegel's views, which
were generally accepted by those who occupied themselves with
philosophical questions, universal history was described as "Progress in the
consciousness of freedom" (Fortschritt im Bewusstsein der Freiheit). In
each period of the world's history, it was explained, some one nation or race
had been intrusted with the high mission of enabling the Absolute Reason,
or Weltgeist, to express itself in objective existence, while the other nations
and races had for the time no metaphysical justification for their existence,
and no higher duty than to imitate slavishly the favoured rival in which the
Weltgeist had for the moment chosen to incorporate itself. The incarnation
had taken place first in the Eastern Monarchies, then in Greece, next in
Rome, and lastly in the Germanic race; and it was generally assumed, if not
openly asserted, that this mystical Metempsychosis of the Absolute was
now at an end. The cycle of existence was complete. In the Germanic
peoples the Weltgeist had found its highest and final expression.
Russians in general knew nothing about German philosophy, and were
consequently not in any way affected by these ideas, but there was in
Moscow a small group of young men who ardently studied German
literature and metaphysics, and they were much shocked by Hegel's views.
Ever since the brilliant reign of Catherine II., who had defeated the Turks
and had dreamed of resuscitating the Byzantine Empire, and especially
since the memorable events of 1812-15, when Alexander I. appeared as the
liberator of enthralled Europe and the arbiter of her destinies, Russians were
firmly convinced that their country was destined to play a most important
part in human history. Already the great Russian historian Karamzin had
declared that henceforth Clio must be silent or accord to Russia a prominent
place in the history of the nations. Now, by the Hegelian theory, the whole
of the Slav race was left out in the cold, with no high mission, with no new
truths to divulge, with nothing better to do, in fact, than to imitate the
Germans.
The patriotic philosophers of Moscow could not, of course, adopt this
view. Whilst accepting the fundamental principles, they declared the theory

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to be incomplete. The incompleteness lay in the assumption that humanity
had already entered on the final stages of its development. The Teutonic
nations were perhaps for the moment the leaders in the march of
civilisation, but there was no reason to suppose that they would always
retain that privileged position. On the contrary, there were already
symptoms that their ascendency was drawing to a close. "Western Europe,"
it was said, "presents a strange, saddening spectacle. Opinion struggles
against opinion, power against power, throne against throne. Science, Art,
and Religion, the three chief motors of social life, have lost their force. We
venture to make an assertion which to many at present may seem strange,
but which will be in a few years only too evident: Western Europe is on the
highroad to ruin! We Russians, on the contrary, are young and fresh, and
have taken no part in the crimes of Europe. We have a great mission to
fulfil. Our name is already inscribed on the tablets of victory, and now we
have to inscribe our spirit in the history of the human mind. A higher kind
of victory—the victory of Science, Art and Faith—awaits us on the ruins of
tottering Europe!"*

* These words were written by Prince Odoefski.

This conclusion was supported by arguments drawn from history—or, at
least, what was believed to be history. The European world was represented
as being composed of two hemispheres—the Eastern or Graeco-Slavonic on
the one hand, and the Western, or Roman Catholic and Protestant, on the
other. These two hemispheres, it was said, are distinguished from each other
by many fundamental characteristics. In both of them Christianity formed
originally the basis of civilisation, but in the West it became distorted and
gave a false direction to the intellectual development. By placing the logical
reason of the learned above the conscience of the whole Church, Roman
Catholicism produced Protestantism, which proclaimed the right of private
judgment and consequently became split up into innumerable sects. The
dry, logical spirit which was thus fostered created a purely intellectual, one-
sided philosophy, which must end in pure scepticism, by blinding men to
those great truths which lie above the sphere of reasoning and logic. The
Graeco-Slavonic world, on the contrary, having accepted Christianity not
from Rome, but from Byzantium, received pure orthodoxy and true
enlightenment, and was thus saved alike from Papal tyranny and from
Protestant free-thinking. Hence the Eastern Christians have preserved

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faithfully not only the ancient dogmas, but also the ancient spirit of
Christianity—that spirit of pious humility, resignation, and brotherly love
which Christ taught by precept and example. If they have not yet a
philosophy, they will create one, and it will far surpass all previous systems;
for in the writings of the Greek Fathers are to be found the germs of a
broader, a deeper, and a truer philosophy than the dry, meagre rationalism
of the West—a philosophy founded not on the logical faculty alone, but on
the broader basis of human nature as a whole.
The fundamental characteristics of the Graeco-Slavonic world—so runs
the Slavophil theory—have been displayed in the history of Russia.
Throughout Western Christendom the principal of individual judgment and
reckless individual egotism have exhausted the social forces and brought
society to the verge of incurable anarchy and inevitable dissolution,
whereas the social and political history of Russia has been harmonious and
peaceful. It presents no struggles between the different social classes, and
no conflicts between Church and State. All the factors have worked in
unison, and the development has been guided by the spirit of pure
orthodoxy. But in this harmonious picture there is one big, ugly black spot
—Peter, falsely styled "the Great," and his so-called reforms. Instead of
following the wise policy of his ancestors, Peter rejected the national
traditions and principles, and applied to his country, which belonged to the
Eastern world, the principles of Western civilisation. His reforms,
conceived in a foreign spirit, and elaborated by men who did not possess
the national instincts, were forced upon the nation against its will, and the
result was precisely what might have been expected. The "broad Slavonic
nature" could not be controlled by institutions which had been invented by
narrow-minded, pedantic German bureaucrats, and, like another Samson, it
pulled down the building in which foreign legislators sought to confine it.
The attempt to introduce foreign culture had a still worse effect. The upper
classes, charmed and dazzled by the glare and glitter of Western science,
threw themselves impulsively on the newly found treasures, and thereby
condemned themselves to moral slavery and intellectual sterility.
Fortunately—and herein lay one of the fundamental principles of the
Slavophil doctrine—the imported civilisation had not at all infected the
common people. Through all the changes which the administration and the
Noblesse underwent the peasantry preserved religiously in their hearts "the
living legacy of antiquity," the essence of Russian nationality, "a clear

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spring welling up living waters, hidden and unknown, but powerful."* To
recover this lost legacy by studying the character, customs, and institutions
of the peasantry, to lead the educated classes back to the path from which
they had strayed, and to re-establish that intellectual and moral unity which
had been disturbed by the foreign importations—such was the task which
the Slavophils proposed to themselves.

* This was one of the favourite themes of Khomiakof, the
Slavophil poet and theologian.

Deeply imbued with that romantic spirit which distorted all the
intellectual activity of the time, the Slavophils often indulged in the wildest
exaggerations, condemning everything foreign and praising everything
Russian. When in this mood they saw in the history of the West nothing but
violence, slavery, and egotism, and in that of their own country free-will,
liberty, and peace. The fact that Russia did not possess free political
institutions was adduced as a precious fruit of that spirit of Christian
resignation and self-sacrifice which places the Russian at such an
immeasurable height above the proud, selfish European; and because
Russia possessed few of the comforts and conveniences of common life, the
West was accused of having made comfort its God! We need not, however,
dwell on these puerilities, which only gained for their authors the reputation
of being ignorant, narrow-minded men, imbued with a hatred of
enlightenment and desirous of leading their country back to its primitive
barbarism. What the Slavophils really condemned, at least in their calmer
moments, was not European culture, but the uncritical, indiscriminate
adoption of it by their countrymen. Their tirades against foreign culture
must appear excusable when we remember that many Russians of the upper
ranks could speak and write French more correctly than their native
language, and that even the great national poet Pushkin was not ashamed to
confess—what was not true, and a mere piece of affectation—that "the
language of Europe" was more familiar to him than his mother-tongue!
The Slavophil doctrine, though it made a great noise in the world, never
found many adherents. The society of St. Petersburg regarded it as one of
those harmless provincial eccentricities which are always to be found in
Moscow. In the modern capital, with its foreign name, its streets and
squares on the European model, its palaces and churches in the Renaissance
style, and its passionate love of everything French, any attempt to

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resuscitate the old Boyaric times would have been eminently ridiculous.
Indeed, hostility to St. Petersburg and to "the Petersburg period of Russian
history" is one of the characteristic traits of genuine Slavophilism. In
Moscow the doctrine found a more appropriate home. There the ancient
churches, with the tombs of Grand Princes and holy martyrs, the palace in
which the Tsars of Muscovy had lived, the Kremlin which had resisted—not
always successfully—the attacks of savage Tartars and heretical Poles, the
venerable Icons that had many a time protected the people from danger, the
block of masonry from which, on solemn occasions, the Tsar and the
Patriarch had addressed the assembled multitude—these, and a hundred
other monuments sanctified by tradition, have kept alive in the popular
memory some vague remembrance of the olden time, and are still capable
of awakening antiquarian patriotism.
The inhabitants, too, have preserved something of the old Muscovite
character. Whilst successive sovereigns have been striving to make the
country a progressive European empire, Moscow has remained the home of
passive conservatism and an asylum for the discontented, especially for the
disappointed aspirants to Imperial favour. Abandoned by the modern
Emperors, she can glory in her ancient Tsars. But even the Muscovites were
not prepared to accept the Slavophil doctrine in the extreme form which it
assumed, and were not a little perplexed by the eccentricities of those who
professed it. Plain, sensible people, though they might be proud of being
citizens of the ancient capital, and might thoroughly enjoy a joke at the
expense of St. Petersburg, could not understand a little coterie of enthusiasts
who sought neither official rank nor decorations, who slighted many of the
conventionalities of the higher classes to which by birth and education they
belonged, who loved to fraternise with the common people, and who
occasionally dressed in the national costume which had been discarded by
the nobles since the time of Peter the Great.
The Slavophils thus remained merely a small literary party, which
probably did not count more than a dozen members, but their influence was
out of all proportion to their numbers. They preached successfully the
doctrine that the historical development of Russia has been peculiar, that
her present social and political organisation is radically different from that
of the countries of Western Europe, and that consequently the social and
political evils from which she suffers are not to be cured by the remedies
which have proved efficacious in France and Germany. These truths, which

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now appear commonplace, were formerly by no means generally
recognised, and the Slavophils deserve credit for directing attention to
them. Besides this, they helped to awaken in the upper classes a lively
sympathy with the poor, oppressed, and despised peasantry. So long as the
Emperor Nicholas lived they had to confine themselves to a purely literary
activity; but during the great reforms initiated by his successor, Alexander
II., they descended into the arena of practical politics, and played a most
useful and honourable part in the emancipation of the serfs. In the new local
self-government, too—the Zemstvo and the new municipal institutions—
they laboured energetically and to good purpose. Of all this I shall have
occasion to speak more fully in future chapters.
But what of their Panslavist aspirations? By their theory they were
constrained to pay attention to the Slav race as a whole, but they were more
Russian than Slav, and more Muscovite than Russian. The Panslavist
element consequently occupied a secondary place in Slavophil doctrine.
Though they did much to stimulate popular sympathy with the Southern
Slavs, and always cherished the hope that the Serbs, Bulgarians, and
cognate Slav nationalities would one day throw off the bondage of the
German and the Turk, they never proposed any elaborate project for the
solution of the Eastern Question. So far as I was able to gather from their
conversation, they seemed to favour the idea of a grand Slavonic
Confederation, in which the hegemony would, of course, belong to Russia.
In ordinary times the only steps which they took for the realisation of this
idea consisted in contributing money for schools and churches among the
Slav population of Austria and Turkey, and in educating young Bulgarians
in Russia. During the Cretan insurrection they sympathised warmly with the
insurgents as co-religionists, but afterwards—especially during the crisis of
the Eastern Question which culminated in the Treaty of San Stefano and the
Congress of Berlin (1878)—their Hellenic sympathies cooled, because the
Greeks showed that they had political aspirations inconsistent with the
designs of Russia, and that they were likely to be the rivals rather than the
allies of the Slavs in the struggle for the Sick Man's inheritance.
Since the time when I was living in Moscow in constant intercourse with
the leading Slavophils more than a quarter of a century has passed, and of
those with whom I spent so many pleasant evenings discussing the past
history and future destinies of the Slav races, not one remains alive. All the
great prophets of the old Slavophil doctrine—Jun Samarin, Prince

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Tcherkaski, Ivan Aksakof, Kosheleff—have departed without leaving
behind them any genuine disciples. The present generation of Muscovite
frondeurs, who continue to rail against Western Europe and the pedantic
officialism of St. Petersburg, are of a more modern and less academic type.
Their philippics are directed not against Peter the Great and his reforms, but
rather against recent Ministers of Foreign Affairs who are thought to have
shown themselves too subservient to foreign Powers, and against M. Witte,
the late Minister of Finance, who is accused of favouring the introduction of
foreign capital and enterprise, and of sacrificing to unhealthy industrial
development the interests of the agricultural classes. These laments and
diatribes are allowed free expression in private conversation and in the
Press, but they do not influence very deeply the policy of the Government
or the natural course of events; for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs continues
to cultivate friendly relations with the Cabinets of the West, and Moscow is
rapidly becoming, by the force of economic conditions, the great industrial
and commercial centre of the Empire.
The administrative and bureaucratic centre—if anything on the frontier of
a country can be called its centre—has long been, and is likely to remain,
Peter's stately city at the mouth of the Neva, to which I now invite the
reader to accompany me.

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CHAPTER XXVI
ST. PETERSBURG AND EUROPEAN INFLUENCE

St. Petersburg and Berlin—Big Houses—The "Lions"—Peter the Great
—His Aims and Policy—The German Regime—Nationalist Reaction—
French Influence—Consequent Intellectual Sterility—Influence of the
Sentimental School—Hostility to Foreign Influences—A New Period of
Literary Importation—Secret Societies—The Catastrophe—The Age of
Nicholas—A Terrible War on Parnassus—Decline of Romanticism and
Transcendentalism—Gogol—The Revolutionary Agitation of 1848—New
Reaction—Conclusion.
From whatever side the traveller approaches St. Petersburg, unless he
goes thither by sea, he must traverse several hundred miles of forest and
morass, presenting few traces of human habitation or agriculture. This fact
adds powerfully to the first impression which the city makes on his mind. In
the midst of a waste howling wilderness, he suddenly comes on a
magnificent artificial oasis.
Of all the great European cities, the one that most resembles the capital
of the Tsars is Berlin. Both are built on perfectly level ground; both have
wide, regularly arranged streets; in both there is a general look of stiffness
and symmetry which suggests military discipline and German bureaucracy.
But there is at least one profound difference. Though Berlin is said by
geographers to be built on the Spree, we might live a long time in the city
without noticing the sluggish little stream on which the name of a river has
been undeservedly conferred. St. Petersburg, on the contrary, is built on a
magnificent river, which forms the main feature of the place. By its breadth,
and by the enormous volume of its clear, blue, cold water, the Neva is
certainly one of the noblest rivers of Europe. A few miles before reaching
the Gulf of Finland it breaks up into several streams and forms a delta. It is
here that St. Petersburg stands.
Like the river, everything in St. Petersburg is on a colossal scale. The
streets, the squares, the palaces, the public buildings, the churches,
whatever may be their defects, have at least the attribute of greatness, and

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seem to have been designed for the countless generations to come, rather
than for the practical wants of the present inhabitants. In this respect the
city well represents the Empire of which it is the capital. Even the private
houses are built in enormous blocks and divided into many separate
apartments. Those built for the working classes sometimes contain, I am
assured, more than a thousand inhabitants. How many cubic feet of air is
allowed to each person, I do not know; not so many, I fear, as is
recommended by the most advanced sanitary authorities.
For a detailed description of the city I must refer the reader to the guide
books. Among its numerous monuments, of which the Russians are justly
proud, I confess that the one which interested me most was neither St.
Isaac's Cathedral, with its majestic gilded dome, its colossal monolithic
columns of red granite, and its gaudy interior; nor the Hermitage, with its
magnificent collection of Dutch pictures; nor the gloomy, frowning fortress
of St. Peter and St. Paul, containing the tombs of the Emperors. These and
other "sights" may deserve all the praise which enthusiastic tourists have
lavished upon them, but what made a far deeper impression on me was the
little wooden house in which Peter the Great lived whilst his future capital
was being built. In its style and arrangement it looks more like the hut of a
navvy than the residence of a Tsar, but it was quite in keeping with the
character of the illustrious man who occupied it. Peter could and did
occasionally work like a navvy without feeling that his Imperial dignity was
thereby impaired. When he determined to build a new capital on a Finnish
marsh, inhabited chiefly by wildfowl, he did not content himself with
exercising his autocratic power in a comfortable arm chair. Like the Greek
gods, he went down from his Olympus and took his place in the ranks of
ordinary mortals, superintending the work with his own eyes, and taking
part in it with his own hands. If he was as arbitrary and oppressive as any of
the pyramid-building Pharaohs, he could at least say in self-justification that
he did not spare himself any more than his people, but exposed himself
freely to the discomforts and dangers under which thousands of his fellow-
labourers succumbed.
In reading the account of Peter's life, written in part by his own pen, we
can easily understand how the piously Conservative section of his subjects
failed to recognise in him the legitimate successor of the orthodox Tsars.
The old Tsars had been men of grave, pompous demeanour, deeply imbued
with the consciousness of their semi-religious dignity. Living habitually in

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Moscow or its immediate neighbourhood, they spent their time in attending
long religious services, in consulting with their Boyars, in being present at
ceremonious hunting-parties, in visiting the monasteries, and in holding
edifying conversations with ecclesiastical dignitaries or revered ascetics. If
they undertook a journey, it was probably to make a pilgrimage to some
holy shrine; and, whether in Moscow or elsewhere, they were always
protected from contact with ordinary humanity by a formidable barricade of
court ceremonial. In short, they combined the characters of a Christian
monk and of an Oriental potentate.
Peter was a man of an entirely different type, and played in the calm,
dignified, orthodox, ceremonious world of Moscow the part of the bull in
the china shop, outraging ruthlessly and wantonly all the time-honored
traditional conceptions of propriety and etiquette. Utterly regardless of
public opinion and popular prejudices, he swept away the old formalities,
avoided ceremonies of all kinds, scoffed at ancient usage, preferred foreign
secular books to edifying conversations, chose profane heretics as his boon
companions, travelled in foreign countries, dressed in heretical costume,
defaced the image of God and put his soul in jeopardy by shaving off his
beard, compelled his nobles to dress and shave like himself, rushed about
the Empire as if goaded on by the demon of unrest, employed his sacred
hands in carpentering and other menial occupations, took part openly in the
uproarious orgies of his foreign soldiery, and, in short, did everything that
"the Lord's anointed" might reasonably be expected not to do. No wonder
the Muscovites were scandalised by his conduct, and that some of them
suspected he was not the Tsar at all, but Antichrist in disguise. And no
wonder he felt the atmosphere of Moscow oppressive, and preferred living
in the new capital which he had himself created.
His avowed object in building St. Petersburg was to have "a window by
which the Russians might look into civilised Europe"; and well has the city
fulfilled its purpose. From its foundation may be dated the European period
of Russian history. Before Peter's time Russia belonged to Asia rather than
to Europe, and was doubtless regarded by Englishmen and Frenchmen
pretty much as we nowadays regard Bokhara or Kashgar; since that time
she has formed an integral part of the European political system, and her
intellectual history has been but a reflection of the intellectual history of
Western Europe, modified and coloured by national character and by
peculiar local conditions.

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When we speak of the intellectual history of a nation we generally mean
in reality the intellectual history of the upper classes. With regard to Russia,
more perhaps than with regard to any other country, this distinction must
always carefully be borne in mind. Peter succeeded in forcing European
civilisation on the nobles, but the people remained unaffected. The nation
was, as it were, cleft in two, and with each succeeding generation the cleft
has widened. Whilst the masses clung obstinately to their time-honoured
customs and beliefs, the nobles came to look on the objects of popular
veneration as the relics of a barbarous past, of which a civilised nation
ought to be ashamed.
The intellectual movement inaugurated by Peter had a purely practical
character. He was himself a thorough utilitarian, and perceived clearly that
what his people needed was not theological or philosophical enlightment,
but plain, practical knowledge suitable for the requirements of everyday
life. He wanted neither theologians nor philosophers, but military and naval
officers, administrators, artisans, miners, manufacturers, and merchants, and
for this purpose he introduced secular technical education. For the young
generation primary schools were founded, and for more advanced pupils the
best foreign works on fortification, architecture, navigation, metallurgy,
engineering and cognate subjects were translated into the native tongue.
Scientific men and cunning artificers were brought into the country, and
young Russians were sent abroad to learn foreign languages and the useful
arts. In a word, everything was done that seemed likely to raise the Russians
to the level of material well-being already attained by the more advanced
nations.
We have here an important peculiarity in the intellectual development of
Russia. In Western Europe the modern scientific spirit, being the natural
offspring of numerous concomitant historical causes, was born in the
natural way, and Society had, consequently, before giving birth to it, to
endure the pains of pregnancy and the throes of prolonged labour. In
Russia, on the contrary, this spirit appeared suddenly as an adult foreigner,
adopted by a despotic paterfamilias. Thus Russia made the transition from
mediaeval to modern times without any violent struggle between the old
and the new conceptions such as had taken place in the West. The Church,
effectually restrained from all active opposition by the Imperial power,
preserved unmodified her ancient beliefs; whilst the nobles, casting their
traditional conceptions and beliefs to the winds, marched forward

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unfettered on that path which their fathers and grandfathers had regarded as
the direct road to perdition.
During the first part of Peter's reign Russia was not subjected to the
exclusive influence of any one particular country. Thoroughly cosmopolitan
in his sympathies, the great reformer, like the Japanese of the present day,
was ready to borrow from any foreign nation—German, Dutch, Danish, or
French—whatever seemed to him to suit his purpose. But soon the
geographical proximity to Germany, the annexation of the Baltic Provinces
in which the civilisation was German, and intermarriages between the
Imperial family and various German dynasties, gave to German influence a
decided preponderance. When the Empress Anne, Peter's niece, who had
been Duchess of Courland, entrusted the whole administration of the
country to her favourite Biron, the German influence became almost
exclusive, and the Court, the official world, and the schools were
Germanised.
The harsh, cruel, tyrannical rule of Biron produced a strong reaction,
ending in a revolution, which raised to the throne the Princess Elizabeth,
Peter's unmarried daughter, who had lived in retirement and neglect during
the German regime. She was expected to rid the country of foreigners, and
she did what she could to fulfil the expectations that were entertained of
her. With loud protestations of patriotic feelings, she removed the Germans
from all important posts, demanded that in future the members of the
Academy should be chosen from among born Russians, and gave orders
that the Russian youth should be carefully prepared for all kinds of official
activity.
This attempt to throw off the German bondage did not lead to intellectual
independence. During Peter's violent reforms Russia had ruthlessly thrown
away her own historic past with whatever germs it contained, and now she
possessed none of the elements of a genuine national culture. She was in the
position of a fugitive who has escaped from slavery, and, finding himself in
danger of starvation, looks about for a new master. The upper classes, who
had acquired a taste for foreign civilisation, no sooner threw off everything
German than they sought some other civilisation to put in its place. And
they could not long hesitate in making a choice, for at that time all who
thought of culture and refinement turned their eyes to Paris and Versailles.
All that was most brilliant and refined was to be found at the Court of the

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French kings, under whose patronage the art and literature of the
Renaissance had attained their highest development. Even Germany, which
had resisted the ambitious designs of Louis XIV., imitated the manners of
his Court. Every petty German potentate strove to ape the pomp and dignity
of the Grand Monarque; and the courtiers, affecting to look on everything
German as rude and barbarous, adopted French fashions, and spoke a
hybrid jargon which they considered much more elegant than the plain
mother tongue. In a word, Gallomania had become the prevailing social
epidemic of the time, and it could not fail to attack and metamorphose such
a class as the Russian Noblesse, which possessed few stubborn deep-rooted
national convictions.
At first the French influence was manifested chiefly in external forms—
that is to say, in dress, manners, language, and upholstery—but gradually,
and very rapidly after the accession of Catherine II., the friend of Voltaire
and the Encyclopaedists, it sank deeper. Every noble who had pretensions to
being "civilised" learned to speak French fluently, and gained some
superficial acquaintance with French literature. The tragedies of Corneille
and Racine and the comedies of Moliere were played regularly at the Court
theatre in presence of the Empress, and awakened a real or affected
enthusiasm among the audience. For those who preferred reading in their
native language, numerous translations were published, a simple list of
which would fill several pages. Among them we find not only Voltaire,
Rousseau, Lesage, Marmontel, and other favourite French authors, but also
all the masterpieces of European literature, ancient and modern, which at
that time enjoyed a high reputation in the French literary world—Homer
and Demosthenes, Cicero and Virgil, Ariosto and Camoens, Milton and
Locke, Sterne and Fielding.
It is related of Byron that he never wrote a description whilst the scene
was actually before him; and this fact points to an important psychological
principle. The human mind, so long as it is compelled to strain the receptive
faculties, cannot engage in that "poetic" activity—to use the term in its
Greek sense—which is commonly called "original creation." And as with
individuals, so with nations. By accepting in a lump a foreign culture a
nation inevitably condemns itself for a time to intellectual sterility. So long
as it is occupied in receiving and assimilating a flood of new ideas,
unfamiliar conceptions, and foreign modes of thought, it will produce
nothing original, and the result of its highest efforts will be merely

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successful imitation. We need not be surprised therefore to find that the
Russians, in becoming acquainted with foreign literature, became imitators
and plagiarists. In this kind of work their natural pliancy of mind and
powerful histrionic talent made them wonderfully successful. Odes, pseudo-
classical tragedies, satirical comedies, epic poems, elegies, and all the other
recognised forms of poetical composition, appeared in great profusion, and
many of the writers acquired a remarkable command over their native
language, which had hitherto been regarded as uncouth and barbarous. But
in all this mass of imitative literature, which has since fallen into well-
merited oblivion, there are very few traces of genuine originality. To obtain
the title of the Russian Racine, the Russian Lafontaine, the Russian Pindar,
or the Russian Homer, was at that time the highest aim of Russian literary
ambition.
Together with the fashionable literature the Russian educated classes
adopted something of the fashionable philosophy. They were peculiarly
unfitted to resist that hurricane of "enlightenment" which swept over
Europe during the latter half of the eighteenth century, first breaking or
uprooting the received philosophical systems, theological conceptions, and
scientific theories, and then shaking to their foundations the existing
political and social institutions. The Russian Noblesse had neither the
traditional conservative spirit, nor the firm, well-reasoned, logical beliefs
which in England and Germany formed a powerful barrier against the
spread of French influence. They had been too recently metamorphosed,
and were too eager to acquire a foreign civilisation, to have even the germs
of a conservative spirit. The rapidity and violence with which Peter's
reforms had been effected, together with the peculiar spirit of Greek
Orthodoxy and the low intellectual level of the clergy, had prevented
theology from associating itself with the new order of things. The upper
classes had become estranged from the beliefs of their forefathers without
acquiring other beliefs to supply the place of those which had been lost. The
old religious conceptions were inseparably interwoven with what was
recognised as antiquated and barbarous, whilst the new philosophical ideas
were associated with all that was modern and civilised. Besides this, the
sovereign, Catherine II., who enjoyed the unbounded admiration of the
upper classes, openly professed allegiance to the new philosophy, and
sought the advice and friendship of its high priests. If we bear in mind these
facts we shall not be surprised to find among the Russian nobles of that

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time a considerable number of so-called "Voltaireans" and numerous
unquestioning believers in the infallibility of the Encyclopedie. What is a
little more surprising is, that the new philosophy sometimes found its way
into the ecclesiastical seminaries. The famous Speranski relates that in the
seminary of St. Petersburg one of his professors, when not in a state of
intoxication, was in the habit of preaching the doctrines of Voltaire and
Diderot!
The rise of the sentimental school in Western Europe produced an
important change in Russian literature, by undermining the inordinate
admiration for the French pseudo-classical school. Florian, Richardson,
Sterne, Rousseau, and Bernardin de St. Pierre found first translators, and
then imitators, and soon the loud-sounding declamation and wordy ecstatic
despair of the stage heroes were drowned in the deep-drawn sighs and
plaintive wailings of amorous swains and peasant-maids forsaken. The
mania seems to have been in Russia even more severe than in the countries
where it originated. Full-grown, bearded men wept because they had not
been born in peaceful primitive times, "when all men were shepherds and
brothers." Hundreds of sighing youths and maidens visited the scenes
described by the sentimental writers, and wandered by the rivers and ponds
in which despairing heroines had drowned themselves. People talked,
wrote, and meditated about "the sympathy of hearts created for each other,"
"the soft communion of sympathetic souls," and much more of the same
kind. Sentimental journeys became a favourite amusement, and formed the
subject of very popular books, containing maudlin absurdities likely to
produce nowadays mirth rather than tears. One traveller, for instance,
throws himself on his knees before an old oak and makes a speech to it;
another weeps daily on the grave of a favourite dog, and constantly longs to
marry a peasant girl; a third talks love to the moon, sends kisses to the stars,
and wishes to press the heavenly orbs to his bosom! For a time the public
would read nothing but absurd productions of this sort, and Karamzin, the
great literary authority of the time, expressly declared that the true function
of Art was "to disseminate agreeable impressions in the region of the
sentimental."
The love of French philosophy vanished as suddenly as the inordinate
admiration of the French pseudo-classical literature. When the great
Revolution broke out in Paris the fashionable philosophic literature in St.
Petersburg disappeared. Men who talked about political freedom and the

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rights of man, without thinking for a moment of limiting the autocratic
power or of emancipating their serfs, were naturally surprised and
frightened on discovering what the liberal principles could effect when
applied to real life. Horrified by the awful scenes of the Terror, they
hastened to divest themselves of the principles which led to such results,
and sank into a kind of optimistic conservatism that harmonised well with
the virtuous sentimentalism in vogue. In this the Empress herself gave the
example. The Imperial disciple and friend of the Encyclopaedists became in
the last years of her reign a decided reactionnaire.
During the Napoleonic wars, when the patriotic feelings were excited,
there was a violent hostility to foreign intellectual influence; and feeble
intermittent attempts were made to throw off the intellectual bondage. The
invasion of the country in 1812 by the Grande Armee, and the burning of
Moscow, added abundant fuel to this patriotic fire. For some time any one
who ventured to express even a moderate admiration for French culture
incurred the risk of being stigmatised as a traitor to his country and a
renegade to the national faith. But this patriotic fanaticism soon evaporated,
and exaggerations of the ultra-national party became the object of satire and
parody. When the political danger was past, and people resumed their
ordinary occupations, those who loved foreign literature returned to their
old favourites—or, as the ultra-patriots called it, to their "wallowing in the
mire"—simply because the native literature did not supply them with what
they desired. "We are quite ready," they said to their upbraiders, "to admire
your great works as soon as they appear, but in the meantime please allow
us to enjoy what we possess." Thus in the last years of the reign of
Alexander I. the patriotic opposition to West European literature gradually
ceased, and a new period of unrestricted intellectual importation began.
The intellectual merchandise now brought into the country was very
different from that which had been imported in the time of Catherine. The
French Revolution, the Napoleonic domination, the patriotic wars, the
restoration of the Bourbons, and the other great events of that memorable
epoch, had in the interval produced profound changes in the intellectual as
well as the political condition of Western Europe. During the Napoleonic
wars Russia had become closely associated with Germany; and now the
peculiar intellectual fermentation which was going on among the German
educated classes was reflected in the society of St. Petersburg. It did not
appear, indeed, in the printed literature, for the Press-censure had been

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recently organised on the principles laid down by Metternich, but it was
none the less violent on that account. Whilst the periodicals were filled with
commonplace meditations on youth, spring, the love of Art, and similar
innocent topics, the young generation was discussing in the salons all the
burning questions which Metternich and his adherents were endeavouring
to extinguish.
These discussions, if discussions they might be called, were not of a very
serious kind. In true dilettante style the fashionable young philosophers
culled from the newest books the newest thoughts and theories, and retailed
them in the salon or the ballroom. And they were always sure to find
attentive listeners. The more astounding the idea or dogma, the more likely
was it to be favourably received. No matter whether it came from the
Rationalists, the Mystics, the Freemasons, or the Methodists, it was certain
to find favour, provided it was novel and presented in an elegant form. The
eclectic minds of that curious time could derive equal satisfaction from the
brilliant discourses of the reactionary jesuitical De Maistre, the
revolutionary odes of Pushkin, and the mysticism of Frau von Krudener.
For the majority the vague theosophic doctrines and the projects for a
spiritual union of governments and peoples had perhaps the greatest charm,
being specially commended by the fact that they enjoyed the protection and
sympathy of the Emperor. Pious souls discovered in the mystical
lucubrations of Jung-Stilling and Baader the final solution of all existing
difficulties—political, social, and philosophical. Men of less dreamy
temperament put their faith in political economy and constitutional theories,
and sought a foundation for their favourite schemes in the past history of
the country and in the supposed fundamental peculiarities of the national
character. Like the young German democrats, who were then talking
enthusiastically about Teutons, Cheruskers, Skalds, the shade of Arminius,
and the heroes of the Niebelungen, these young Russian savants recognised
in early Russian history—when reconstructed according to their own fancy
—lofty political ideals, and dreamed of resuscitating the ancient institutions
in all their pristine imaginary splendour.
Each age has its peculiar social and political panaceas. One generation
puts its trust in religion, another in philanthropy, a third in written
constitutions, a fourth in universal suffrage, a fifth in popular education. In
the Epoch of the Restoration, as it is called, the favourite panacea all over
the Continent was secret political association. Very soon after the overthrow

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of Napoleon the peoples who had risen in arms to obtain political
independence discovered that they had merely changed masters. The
Princes reconstructed Europe according to their own convenience, without
paying much attention to patriotic aspirations, and forgot their promises of
liberal institutions as soon as they were again firmly seated on their thrones.
This was naturally for many a bitter deception. The young generation,
excluded from all share in political life and gagged by the stringent police
supervision, sought to realise its political aspirations by means of secret
societies, resembling more or less the Masonic brotherhoods. There were
the Burschenschaften in Germany; the Union, and the "Aide toi et le ciel
t'aidera," in France; the Order of the Hammer in Spain; the Carbonari in
Italy; and the Hetairai in Greece. In Russia the young nobles followed the
prevailing fashion. Secret societies were formed, and in December, 1825, an
attempt was made to raise a military insurrection in St. Petersburg, for the
purpose of deposing the Imperial family and proclaiming a republic; but the
attempt failed, and the vague Utopian dreams of the romantic would-be
reformers were swept away by grape-shot.
This "December catastrophe," still vividly remembered, was for the
society of St. Petersburg like the giving way of the floor in a crowded ball-
room. But a moment before, all had been animated, careless, and happy;
now consternation was depicted on every face. The salons, that but
yesterday had been ringing with lively discussions on morals, aesthetics,
politics, and theology, were now silent and deserted. Many of those who
had been wont to lead the causeries had been removed to the cells of the
fortress, and those who had not been arrested trembled for themselves or
their friends; for nearly all had of late dabbled more or less in the theory
and practice of revolution. The announcement that five of the conspirators
had been condemned to the gallows and the others sentenced to
transportation did not tend to calm the consternation. Society was like a
discomfited child, who, amidst the delight and excitement of letting off
fireworks, has had its fingers severely burnt.
The sentimental, wavering Alexander I. had been succeeded by his stern,
energetic brother Nicholas, and the command went forth that there should
be no more fireworks, no more dilettante philosophising or political
aspirations. There was, however, little need for such an order. Society had
been, for the moment at least, effectually cured of all tendencies to political
dreaming. It had discovered, to its astonishment and dismay, that these new

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ideas, which were to bring temporal salvation to humanity, and to make all
men happy, virtuous, refined, and poetical, led in reality to exile and the
scaffold! The pleasant dream was at an end, and the fashionable world,
giving up its former habits, took to harmless occupations—card-playing,
dissipation, and the reading of French light literature. "The French
quadrille," as a writer of the time tersely expresses it, "has taken the place
of Adam Smith."
When the storm had passed, the life of the salons began anew, but it was
very different from what it had been. There was no longer any talk about
political economy, theology, popular education, administrative abuses,
social and political reforms. Everything that had any relation to politics in
the wider sense of the term was by tacit consent avoided. Discussions there
were as of old, but they were now confined to literary topics, theories of art,
and similar innocent subjects.
This indifference or positive repugnance to philosophy and political
science, strengthened and prolonged by the repressive system of
administration adopted by Nicholas, was of course fatal to the many-sided
intellectual activity which had flourished during the preceding reign, but it
was by no means unfavourable to the cultivation of imaginative literature.
On the contrary, by excluding those practical interests which tend to disturb
artistic production and to engross the attention of the public, it fostered
what was called in the phraseology of that time "the pure-hearted worship
of the Muses." We need not, therefore, be surprised to find that the reign of
Nicholas, which is commonly and not unjustly described as an epoch of
social and intellectual stagnation, may be called in a certain sense the
Golden Age of Russian literature.
Already in the preceding reign the struggle between the Classical and the
Romantic school—between the adherents of traditional aesthetic principles
and the partisans of untrammelled poetic inspiration—which was being
carried on in Western Europe, was reflected in Russia. A group of young
men belonging to the aristocratic society of St. Petersburg embraced with
enthusiasm the new doctrines, and declared war against "classicism," under
which term they understood all that was antiquated, dry, and pedantic.
Discarding the stately, lumbering, unwieldy periods which had hitherto
been in fashion, they wrote a light, elastic, vigorous style, and formed a
literary society for the express purpose of ridiculing the most approved

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classical writers. The new principles found many adherents, and the new
style many admirers, but this only intensified the hostility of the literary
Conservatives. The staid, respectable leaders of the old school, who had all
their lives kept the fear of Boileau before their eyes and considered his
precepts as the infallible utterances of aesthetic wisdom, thundered against
the impious innovations as unmistakable symptoms of literary decline and
moral degeneracy—representing the boisterous young iconoclasts as
dissipated Don Juans and dangerous freethinkers.
Thus for some time in Russia, as in Western Europe, "a terrible war raged
on Parnassus." At first the Government frowned at the innovators, on
account of certain revolutionary odes which one of their number had
written; but when the Romantic Muse, having turned away from the present
as essentially prosaic, went back into the distant past and soared into the
region of sublime abstractions, the most keen-eyed Press Censors found no
reason to condemn her worship, and the authorities placed almost no
restrictions on free poetic inspiration. Romantic poetry acquired the
protection of the Government and the patronage of the Court, and the names
of Zhukofski, Pushkin, and Lermontof—the three chief representatives of
the Russian Romantic school—became household words in all ranks of the
educated classes.
These three great luminaries of the literary world were of course attended
by a host of satellites of various magnitudes, who did all in their power to
refute the romantic principles by reductiones ad absurdum. Endowed for the
most part with considerable facility of composition, the poetasters poured
forth their feelings with torrential recklessness, demanding freedom for
their inspiration, and cursing the age that fettered them with its prosaic
cares, its cold reason, and its dry science. At the same time the dramatists
and novelists created heroes of immaculate character and angelic purity,
endowed with all the cardinal virtues in the superlative degree; and, as a
contrast to these, terrible Satanic personages with savage passions,
gleaming daggers, deadly poisons, and all manner of aimless melodramatic
villainy. These stilted productions, interspersed with light satirical essays,
historical sketches, literary criticism, and amusing anecdotes, formed the
contents of the periodical literature, and completely satisfied the wants of
the reading public. Almost no one at that time took any interest in public
affairs or foreign politics. The acts of the Government which were watched
most attentively were the promotions in the service and the conferring of

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decorations. The publication of a new tale by Zagoskin or Marlinski—two
writers now well-nigh forgotten—seemed of much greater importance than
any amount of legislation, and such events as the French Revolution of
1830 paled before the publication of a new poem by Pushkin.
The Transcendental philosophy, which in Germany went hand in hand
with the Romantic literature, found likewise a faint reflection in Russia. A
number of young professors and students in Moscow, who had become
ardent admirers of German literature, passed from the works of Schiller,
Goethe, and Hoffmann to the writing of Schelling and Hegel. Trained in the
Romantic school, these young philosophers found at first a special charm in
Schelling's mystical system, teeming with hazy poetical metaphors, and
presenting a misty grandiose picture of the universe; but gradually they felt
the want of some logical basis for their speculations, and Hegel became
their favourite. Gallantly they struggled with the uncouth terminology and
epigrammatic paradoxes of the great thinker, and strove to force their way
through the intricate mazes of his logical formulae. With the ardour of
neophytes they looked at every phenomenon—even the most trivial incident
of common life—from the philosophical point of view, talked day and night
about principles, ideas, subjectivity, Weltauffassung, and similar abstract
entities, and habitually attacked the "hydra of unphilosophy" by analysing
the phenomena presented and relegating the ingredient elements to the
recognised categories. In ordinary life they were men of quiet, grave,
contemplative demeanour, but their faces could flush and their blood boil
when they discussed the all-important question, whether it is possible to
pass logically from Pure Being through Nonentity to the conception of
Development and Definite Existence!
We know how in Western Europe Romanticism and Transcendentalism,
in their various forms, sank into oblivion, and were replaced by a literature
which had a closer connection with ordinary prosaic wants and plain
everyday life. The educated public became weary of the Romantic writers,
who were always "sighing like a furnace," delighting in solitude, cold
eternity, and moonshine, deluging the world with their heart-gushings, and
calling on the heavens and the earth to stand aghast at their Promethean
agonising or their Wertherean despair. Healthy human nature revolted
against the poetical enthusiasts who had lost the faculty of seeing things in
their natural light, and who constantly indulged in that morbid self-analysis
which is fatal to genuine feeling and vigorous action. And in this healthy

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reaction the philosophers fared no better than the poets, with whom, indeed,
they had much in common. Shutting their eyes to the visible world around
them, they had busied themselves with burrowing in the mysterious depths
of Absolute Being, grappling with the ego and the non-ego, constructing the
great world, visible and invisible, out of their own puny internal self-
consciousness, endeavouring to appropriate all departments of human
thought, and imparting to every subject they touched the dryness and
rigidity of an algebraical formula. Gradually men with real human
sympathies began to perceive that from all this philosophical turmoil little
real advantage was to be derived. It became only too evident that the
philosophers were perfectly reconciled with all the evil in the world,
provided it did not contradict their theories; that they were men of the same
type as the physician in Moliere's comedy, whose chief care was that his
patients should die selon les ordonnances de la medicine.
In Russia the reaction first appeared in the aesthetic literature. Its first
influential representative was Gogol (b. 1808, d. 1852), who may be called,
in a certain sense, the Russian Dickens. A minute comparison of those two
great humourists would perhaps show as many points of contrast as of
similarity, but there is a strong superficial resemblance between them. They
both possessed an inexhaustible supply of broad humour and an
imagination of singular vividness. Both had the power of seeing the
ridiculous side of common things, and the talent of producing caricatures
that had a wonderful semblance of reality. A little calm reflection would
suffice to show that the characters presented are for the most part
psychological impossibilities; but on first making their acquaintance we are
so struck with one or two life-like characteristics and various little details
dexterously introduced, and at the same time we are so carried away by the
overflowing fun of the narrative, that we have neither time nor inclination
to use our critical faculties. In a very short time Gogol's fame spread
throughout the length and breadth of the Empire, and many of his characters
became as familiar to his countrymen as Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp were
to Englishmen. His descriptions were so graphic—so like the world which
everybody knew! The characters seemed to be old acquaintances hit off to
the life; and readers revelled in that peculiar pleasure which most of us
derive from seeing our friends successfully mimicked. Even the Iron Tsar
could not resist the fun and humour of "The Inspector" (Revizor), and not
only laughed heartily, but also protected the author against the tyranny of

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the literary censors, who considered that the piece was not written in a
sufficiently "well-intentioned" tone. In a word, the reading public laughed
as it had never laughed before, and this wholesome genuine merriment did
much to destroy the morbid appetite for Byronic heroes and Romantic
affectation.
The Romantic Muse did not at once abdicate, but with the spread of
Gogol's popularity her reign was practically at an end. In vain some of the
conservative critics decried the new favourite as talentless, prosaic, and
vulgar. The public were not to be robbed of their amusement for the sake of
any abstract aesthetic considerations; and young authors, taking Gogol for
their model, chose their subjects from real life, and endeavoured to
delineate with minute truthfulness.
This new intellectual movement was at first purely literary, and affected
merely the manner of writing novels, tales, and poems. The critics who had
previously demanded beauty of form and elegance of expression now
demanded accuracy of description, condemned the aspirations towards so-
called high art, and praised loudly those who produced the best literary
photographs. But authors and critics did not long remain on this purely
aesthetic standpoint. The authors, in describing reality, began to indicate
moral approval and condemnation, and the critics began to pass from the
criticism of the representations to the criticism of the realities represented.
A poem or a tale was often used as a peg on which to hang a moral lecture,
and the fictitious characters were soundly rated for their sins of omission
and commission. Much was said about the defence of the oppressed, female
emancipation, honour, and humanitarianism; and ridicule was unsparingly
launched against all forms of ignorance, apathy, and the spirit of routine.
The ordinary refrain was that the public ought now to discard what was
formerly regarded as poetical and sublime, and to occupy itself with
practical concerns—with the real wants of social life.
The literary movement was thus becoming a movement in favour of
social and political reforms when it was suddenly arrested by political
events in the West. The February Revolution in Paris, and the political
fermentation which appeared during 1848-49 in almost every country of
Europe, alarmed the Emperor Nicholas and his counsellors. A Russian army
was sent into Austria to suppress the Hungarian insurrection and save the
Hapsburg dynasty, and the most stringent measures were taken to prevent

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disorders at home. One of the first precautions for the preservation of
domestic tranquillity was to muzzle the Press more firmly than before, and
to silence the aspirations towards reform and progress; thenceforth nothing
could be printed which was not in strict accordance with the ultra-patriotic
theory of Russian history, as expressed by a leading official personage:
"The past has been admirable, the present is more than magnificent, and the
future will surpass all that the human imagination can conceive!" The alarm
caused by the revolutionary disorders spread to the non-official world, and
gave rise to much patriotic self-congratulation. "The nations of the West," it
was said, "envy us, and if they knew us better—if they could see how happy
and prosperous we are—they would envy us still more. We ought not,
however, to withdraw from Europe our solicitude; its hostility should not
deprive us of our high mission of saving order and restoring rest to the
nations; we ought to teach them to obey authority as we do. It is for us to
introduce the saving principle of order into a world that has fallen a prey to
anarchy. Russia ought not to abandon that mission which has been entrusted
to her by the heavenly and by the earthly Tsar."*

* These words were written by Tchaadaef, who, a few years
before, had vigorously attacked the Slavophils for enouncing
similar views.

Men who saw in the significant political eruption of 1848 nothing but an
outburst of meaningless, aimless anarchy, and who believed that their
country was destined to restore order throughout the civilised world, had of
course little time or inclination to think of putting their own house in order.
No one now spoke of the necessity of social reorganisation: the recently
awakened aspirations and expectations seemed to be completely forgotten.
The critics returned to their old theory that art and literature should be
cultivated for their own sake and not used as a vehicle for the propagation
of ideas foreign to their nature. It seemed, in short, as if all the prolific ideas
which had for a time occupied the public attention had been merely "writ in
water," and had now disappeared without leaving a trace behind them.
In reality the new movement was destined to reappear very soon with
tenfold force; but the account of its reappearance and development belongs
to a future chapter. Meanwhile I may formulate the general conclusion to be
drawn from the foregoing pages. Ever since the time of Peter the Great
there has been such a close connection between Russia and Western Europe

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that every intellectual movement which has appeared in France and
Germany has been reflected—albeit in an exaggerated, distorted form—in
the educated society of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Thus the window which
Peter opened in order to enable his subjects to look into Europe has well
served its purpose.

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CHAPTER XXVII
THE CRIMEAN WAR AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

The Emperor Nicholas and his System—The Men with Aspirations and
the Apathetically Contented—National Humiliation—Popular Discontent
and the Manuscript Literature—Death of Nicholas—Alexander II.—New
Spirit—Reform Enthusiasm—Change in the Periodical Literature—The
Kolokol—The Conservatives—The Tchinovniks—First Specific Proposals
—Joint-Stock Companies—The Serf Question Comes to the Front.
The Russians frankly admit that they were beaten in the Crimean War,
but they regard the heroic defence of Sebastopol as one of the most glorious
events in the military annals of their country. Nor do they altogether regret
the result of the struggle. Often in a half-jocular, half-serious tone they say
that they had reason to be grateful to the Allies. And there is much truth in
this paradoxical statement. The Crimean War inaugurated a new epoch in
the national history. It gave the death-blow to the repressive system of the
Emperor Nicholas, and produced an intellectual movement and a moral
revival which led to gigantic results.
"The affair of December," 1825—I mean the abortive attempt at a
military insurrection in St. Petersburg, to which I have alluded in the
foregoing chapter—gave the key-note to Nicholas's reign. The armed
attempt to overthrow the Imperial power, ending in the execution or exile of
many young members of the first families, struck terror into the Noblesse,
and prepared the way for a period of repressive police administration.
Nicholas had none of the moral limpness and vacillating character of his
predecessor. His was one of those simple, vigorous, tenacious,
straightforward natures—more frequently to be met with among the
Teutonic than among the Slav races—whose conceptions are all founded on
a few deep-rooted, semi-instinctive convictions, and who are utterly
incapable of accommodating themselves with histrionic cleverness to the
changes of external circumstances. From his early youth he had shown a
strong liking for military discipline and a decided repugnance to the
humanitarianism and liberal principles then in fashion. With "the rights of

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man," "the spirit of the age," and similar philosophical abstractions his
strong, domineering nature had no sympathy; and for the vague, loud-
sounding phrases of philosophic liberalism he had a most profound
contempt. "Attend to your military duties," he was wont to say to his
officers before his accession; "don't trouble your heads with philosophy. I
cannot bear philosophers!" The tragic event which formed the prelude to his
reign naturally confirmed and fortified his previous convictions. The
representatives of liberalism, who could talk so eloquently about duty in the
abstract, had, whilst wearing the uniform of the Imperial Guard, openly
disobeyed the repeated orders of their superior officers and attempted to
shake the allegiance of the troops for the purpose of overthrowing the
Imperial power! A man who was at once soldier and autocrat, by nature as
well as by position, could of course admit no extenuating circumstances.
The incident stereotyped his character for life, and made him the sworn
enemy of liberalism and the fanatical defender of autocracy, not only in his
own country, but throughout Europe. In European politics he saw two
forces struggling for mastery—monarchy and democracy, which were in his
opinion identical with order and anarchy; and he was always ready to assist
his brother sovereigns in putting down democratic movements. In his own
Empire he endeavoured by every means in his power to prevent the
introduction of the dangerous ideas. For this purpose a stringent intellectual
quarantine was established on the western frontier. All foreign books and
newspapers, except those of the most harmless kind, were rigorously
excluded. Native writers were placed under strict supervision, and
peremptorily silenced as soon as they departed from what was considered a
"well-intentioned" tone. The number of university students was diminished,
the chairs for political science were suppressed, and the military schools
multiplied. Russians were prevented from travelling abroad, and foreigners
who visited the country were closely watched by the police. By these and
similar measures it was hoped that Russia would be preserved from the
dangers of revolutionary agitation.
Nicholas has been called the Don Quixote of Autocracy, and the
comparison which the term implies is true in many points. By character and
aims he belonged to a time that had passed away; but failure and mishap
could not shake his faith in his ideal, and made no change in his honest,
stubborn nature, which was as loyal and chivalresque as that of the ill-fated
Knight of La Mancha. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, he believed in

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the practical omnipotence of autocracy. He imagined that as his authority
was theoretically unlimited, so his power could work miracles. By nature
and training a soldier, he considered government a slightly modified form
of military discipline, and looked on the nation as an army which might be
made to perform any intellectual or economic evolutions that he might see
fit to command. All social ills seemed to him the consequence of
disobedience to his orders, and he knew only one remedy—more discipline.
Any expression of doubt as to the wisdom of his policy, or any criticism of
existing regulations, he treated as an act of insubordination which a wise
sovereign ought not to tolerate. If he never said, "L'Etat—c'est moi!" it was
because he considered the fact so self-evident that it did not need to be
stated. Hence any attack on the administration, even in the person of the
most insignificant official, was an attack on himself and on the monarchical
principle which he represented. The people must believe—and faith, as we
know, comes not by sight—that they lived under the best possible
government. To doubt this was political heresy. An incautious word or a
foolish joke against the Government was considered a serious crime, and
might be punished by a long exile in some distant and inhospitable part of
the Empire. Progress should by all means be made, but it must be made by
word of command, and in the way ordered. Private initiative in any form
was a thing on no account to be tolerated. Nicholas never suspected that a
ruler, however well-intentioned, energetic, and legally autocratic he may be,
can do but little without the co-operation of his people. Experience
constantly showed him the fruitlessness of his efforts, but he paid no
attention to its teachings. He had formed once for all his theory of
government, and for thirty years he acted according to it with all the
blindness and obstinacy of a reckless, fanatical doctrinaire. Even at the
close of his reign, when the terrible logic of facts had proved his system to
be a mistake—when his armies had been defeated, his best fleet destroyed,
his ports blockaded, and his treasury well-nigh emptied—he could not
recant. "My successor," he is reported to have said on his deathbed, "may
do as he pleases, but I cannot change."
Had Nicholas lived in the old patriarchal times, when kings were the
uncontrolled "shepherds of the people," he would perhaps have been an
admirable ruler; but in the nineteenth century he was a flagrant
anachronism. His system of administration completely broke down. In vain
he multiplied formalities and inspectors, and punished severely the few

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delinquents who happened by some accident to be brought to justice; the
officials continued to pilfer, extort, and misgovern in every possible way.
Though the country was reduced to what would be called in Europe "a state
of siege," the inhabitants might still have said—as they are reported to have
declared a thousand years before—"Our land is great and fertile, but there is
no order in it."
In a nation accustomed to political life and to a certain amount of self-
government, any approach to the system of Nicholas would, of course, have
produced wide-spread dissatisfaction and violent hatred against the ruling
power. But in Russia at that time no such feelings were awakened. The
educated classes—and a fortiori the uneducated—were profoundly
indifferent not only to political questions, but also to ordinary public affairs,
whether local or Imperial, and were quite content to leave them in the hands
of those who were paid for attending to them. In common with the
uneducated peasantry, the nobles had a boundless respect—one might
almost say a superstitious reverence—not only for the person, but also for
the will of the Tsar, and were ready to show unquestioning obedience to his
commands, so long as these did not interfere with their accustomed mode of
life. The Tsar desired them not to trouble their heads with political
questions, and to leave all public matters to the care of the Administration;
and in this respect the Imperial will coincided so well with their personal
inclinations that they had no difficulty in complying with it.
When the Tsar ordered those of them who held office to refrain from
extortion and peculation, his orders were not so punctiliously obeyed, but in
this disobedience there was no open opposition—no assertion of a right to
pilfer and extort. As the disobedience proceeded, not from a feeling of
insubordination, but merely from the weakness that official flesh is heir to,
it was not regarded as very heinous. In the aristocratic circles of St.
Petersburg and Moscow there was the same indifference to political
questions and public affairs. All strove to have the reputation of being
"well-intentioned," which was the first requisite for those who desired
Court favour or advancement in the public service; and those whose
attention was not entirely occupied with official duties, card-playing, and
the ordinary routine of everyday life, cultivated belles-lettres or the fine
arts. In short, the educated classes in Russia at that time showed a complete
indifference to political and social questions, an apathetic acquiescence in

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the system of administration adopted by the Government, and an
unreasoning contentment with the existing state of things.
About the year 1845, when the reaction against Romanticism was
awakening in the reading public an interest in the affairs of real life,* began
to appear what may be called "the men with aspirations," a little band of
generous enthusiasts, strongly resembling the youth in Longfellow's poem
who carries a banner with the device "Excelsior," and strives ever to climb
higher, without having any clear notion of where he was going or of what
he is to do when he reaches the summit. At first they had little more than a
sentimental enthusiasm for the true, the beautiful, and the good, and a
certain Platonic love for free institutions, liberty, enlightenment, progress,
and everything that was generally comprehended at that period under the
term "liberal." Gradually, under the influence of current French literature,
their ideas became a little clearer, and they began to look on reality around
them with a critical eye. They could perceive, without much effort, the
unrelenting tyranny of the Administration, the notorious venality of the
tribunals, the reckless squandering of the public money, the miserable
condition of the serfs, the systematic strangulation of all independent
opinion or private initiative, and, above all, the profound apathy of the
upper classes, who seemed quite content with things as they were.

* Vide supra, p. 377 et seq.

With such ugly facts staring them in the face, and with the habit of
looking at things from the moral point of view, these men could understand
how hollow and false were the soothing or triumphant phrases of official
optimism. They did not, indeed, dare to express their indignation publicly,
for the authorities would allow no public expression of dissatisfaction with
the existing state of things, but they disseminated their ideas among their
friends and acquaintances by means of conversation and manuscript
literature, and some of them, as university professors and writers in the
periodical Press, contrived to awaken in a certain section of the young
generation an ardent enthusiasm for enlightenment and progress, and a
vague hope that a brighter day was about to dawn.
Not a few sympathised with these new conceptions and aspirations, but
the great majority of the nobles regarded them—especially after the French
Revolution of 1848—as revolutionary and dangerous. Thus the educated

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classes became divided into two sections, which have sometimes been
called the Liberals and the Conservatives, but which might be more
properly designated the men with aspirations and the apathetically
contented. These latter doubtless felt occasionally the irksomeness of the
existing system, but they had always one consolation—if they were
oppressed at home they were feared abroad. The Tsar was at least a
thorough soldier, possessing an enormous and well-equipped army by
which he might at any moment impose his will on Europe. Ever since the
glorious days of 1812, when Napoleon was forced to make an ignominious
retreat from the ruins of Moscow, the belief that the Russian soldiers were
superior to all others, and that the Russian army was invincible, had become
an article of the popular creed; and the respect which the voice of Nicholas
commanded in Western Europe seemed to prove that the fact was admitted
by foreign nations. In these and similar considerations the apathetically
contented found a justification for their lethargy.
When it became evident that Russia was about to engage in a trial of
strength with the Western Powers, this optimism became general. "The
heavy burdens," it was said, "which the people have had to bear were
necessary to make Russia the first military Power in Europe, and now the
nation will reap the fruits of its long-suffering and patient resignation. The
West will learn that her boasted liberty and liberal institutions are of little
service in the hour of danger, and the Russians who admire such institutions
will be constrained to admit that a strong, all-directing autocracy is the only
means of preserving national greatness." As the patriotic fervour and
military enthusiasm increased, nothing was heard but praises of Nicholas
and his system. The war was regarded by many as a kind of crusade—even
the Emperor spoke about the defence of "the native soil and the holy
faith"—and the most exaggerated expectations were entertained of its
results. The old Eastern Question was at last to be solved in accordance
with Russian aspirations, and Nicholas was about to realise Catherine II.'s
grand scheme of driving the Turks out of Europe. The date at which the
troops would arrive at Constantinople was actively discussed, and a
Slavophil poet called on the Emperor to lie down in Constantinople, and
rise up as Tsar of a Panslavonic Empire. Some enthusiasts even expected
the speedy liberation of Jerusalem from the power of the Infidel. To the
enemy, who might possibly hinder the accomplishment of these schemes,

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very little attention was paid. "We have only to throw our hats at them!"
(Shapkami zakidaem) became a favourite expression.
There were, however, a few men in whom the prospect of the coming
struggle awoke very different thoughts and feelings. They could not share
the sanguine expectations of those who were confident of success. "What
preparations have we made," they asked, "for the struggle with civilisation,
which now sends its forces against us? With all our vast territory and
countless population we are incapable of coping with it. When we talk of
the glorious campaign against Napoleon, we forget that since that time
Europe has been steadily advancing on the road of progress while we have
been standing still. We march not to victory, but to defeat, and the only
grain of consolation which we have is that Russia will learn by experience a
lesson that will be of use to her in the future."*

* These are the words of Granovski.

These prophets of evil found, of course, few disciples, and were
generally regarded as unworthy sons of the Fatherland—almost as traitors
to their country. But their predictions were confirmed by events. The Allies
were victorious in the Crimea, and even the despised Turks made a
successful stand on the line of the Danube. In spite of the efforts of the
Government to suppress all unpleasant intelligence, it soon became known
that the military organisation was little, if at all, better than the civil
administration—that the individual bravery of soldiers and officers was
neutralised by the incapacity of the generals, the venality of the officials,
and the shameless peculation of the commissariat department. The Emperor,
it was said, had drilled out of the officers all energy, individuality, and
moral force. Almost the only men who showed judgment, decision, and
energy were the officers of the Black Sea fleet, which had been less
subjected to the prevailing system. As the struggle went on, it became
evident how weak the country really was—how deficient in the resources
necessary to sustain a prolonged conflict. "Another year of war," writes an
eye-witness in 1855, "and the whole of Southern Russia will be ruined." To
meet the extraordinary demands on the Treasury, recourse was had to an
enormous issue of paper money; but the rapid depreciation of the currency
showed that this resource would soon be exhausted. Militia regiments were
everywhere raised throughout the country, and many proprietors spent large
sums in equipping volunteer corps; but very soon this enthusiasm cooled

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when it was found that the patriotic efforts enriched the jobbers without
inflicting any serious injury on the enemy.
Under the sting of the great national humiliation, the upper classes awoke
from their optimistic resignation. They had borne patiently the oppression
of a semi-military administration, and for this! The system of Nicholas had
been put to a crucial test, and found wanting. The policy which had
sacrificed all to increase the military power of the Empire was seen to be a
fatal error, and the worthlessness of the drill-sergeant regime was proved by
bitter experience. Those administrative fetters which had for more than a
quarter of a century cramped every spontaneous movement had failed to
fulfil even the narrow purpose for which they had been forged. They had,
indeed, secured a certain external tranquillity during those troublous times
when Europe was convulsed by revolutionary agitation; but this tranquillity
was not that of healthy normal action, but of death—and underneath the
surface lay secret and rapidly spreading corruption. The army still
possessed that dashing gallantry which it had displayed in the campaigns of
Suvorof, that dogged, stoical bravery which had checked the advance of
Napoleon on the field of Borodino, and that wondrous power of endurance
which had often redeemed the negligence of generals and the defects of the
commissariat; but the result was now not victory, but defeat. How could this
be explained except by the radical defects of that system which had been
long practised with such inflexible perseverance? The Government had
imagined that it could do everything by its own wisdom and energy, and in
reality it had done nothing, or worse than nothing. The higher officers had
learned only too well to be mere automata; the ameliorations in the military
organisation, on which Nicholas had always bestowed special attention,
were found to exist for the most part only in the official reports; the
shameful exploits of the commissariat department were such as to excite the
indignation of those who had long lived in an atmosphere of official jobbery
and peculation; and the finances, which people had generally supposed to
be in a highly satisfactory condition, had become seriously crippled by the
first great national effort.
This deep and wide-spread dissatisfaction was not allowed to appear in
the Press, but it found very free expression in the manuscript literature and
in conversation. In almost every house—I mean, of course, among the
educated classes—words were spoken which a few months before would
have seemed treasonable, if not blasphemous. Philippics and satires in prose

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and verse were written by the dozen, and circulated in hundreds of copies.
A pasquil on the Commander in Chief, or a tirade against the Government,
was sure to be eagerly read and warmly approved of. As a specimen of this
kind of literature, and an illustration of the public opinion of the time, I may
translate here one of those metrical tirades. Though it was never printed, it
obtained a wide circulation:
"'God has placed me over Russia,' said the Tsar to us, 'and you must bow
down before me, for my throne is His altar. Trouble not yourselves with
public affairs, for I think for you and watch over you every hour. My
watchful eye detects internal evils and the machinations of foreign enemies;
and I have no need of counsel, for God inspires me with wisdom. Be proud,
therefore, of being my slaves, O Russians, and regard my will as your law.'
"We listened to these words with deep reverence, and gave a tacit
consent; and what was the result? Under mountains of official papers real
interests were forgotten. The letter of the law was observed, but negligence
and crime were allowed to go unpunished. While grovelling in the dust
before ministers and directors of departments in the hope of receiving tchins
and decorations, the officials stole unblushingly; and theft became so
common that he who stole the most was the most respected. The merits of
officers were decided at reviews; and he who obtained the rank of General
was supposed capable of becoming at once an able governor, an excellent
engineer, or a most wise senator. Those who were appointed governors were
for the most part genuine satraps, the scourges of the provinces entrusted to
their care. The other offices were filled up with as little attention to the
merits of the candidates. A stable-boy became Press censor! an Imperial
fool became admiral! Kleinmichel became a count! In a word, the country
was handed over to the tender mercies of a band of robbers.
"And what did we Russians do all this time?
"We Russians slept! With groans the peasant paid his yearly dues; with
groans the proprietor mortgaged the second half of his estate; groaning, we
all paid our heavy tribute to the officials. Occasionally, with a grave shaking
of the head, we remarked in a whisper that it was a shame and a disgrace—
that there was no justice in the courts—that millions were squandered on
Imperial tours, kiosks, and pavilions—that everything was wrong; and then,
with an easy conscience, we sat down to our rubber, praised the acting of
Rachel, criticised the singing of Frezzolini, bowed low to venal magnates,

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and squabbled with each other for advancement in the very service which
we so severely condemned. If we did not obtain the place we wished we
retired to our ancestral estates, where we talked of the crops, fattened in
indolence and gluttony, and lived a genuine animal life. If any one, amidst
the general lethargy, suddenly called upon us to rise and fight for the truth
and for Russia, how ridiculous did he appear! How cleverly the Pharisaical
official ridiculed him, and how quickly the friends of yesterday showed him
the cold shoulder! Under the anathema of public opinion, in some distant
Siberian mine he recognised what a heinous sin it was to disturb the heavy
sleep of apathetic slaves. Soon he was forgotten, or remembered as an
unfortunate madman; and the few who said, 'Perhaps after all he was right,'
hastened to add, 'but that is none of our business.'
"But amidst all this we had at least one consolation, one thing to be proud
of—the might of Russia in the assembly of kings. 'What need we care,' we
said, 'for the reproaches of foreign nations? We are stronger than those who
reproach us.' And when at great reviews the stately regiments marched past
with waving standards, glittering helmets, and sparkling bayonets, when we
heard the loud hurrah with which the troops greeted the Emperor, then our
hearts swelled with patriotic pride, and we were ready to repeat the words
of the poet—
"Strong is our native country, and great the Russian Tsar."
"Then British statesmen, in company with the crowned conspirator of
France, and with treacherous Austria, raised Western Europe against us, but
we laughed scornfully at the coming storm. 'Let the nations rave,' we said;
'we have no cause to be afraid. The Tsar doubtless foresaw all, and has long
since made the necessary preparations.' Boldly we went forth to fight, and
confidently awaited the moment of the struggle.
"And lo! after all our boasting we were taken by surprise, and caught
unawares, as by a robber in the dark. The sleep of innate stupidity blinded
our Ambassadors, and our Foreign Minister sold us to our enemies.* Where
were our millions of soldiers? Where was the well-considered plan of
defence? One courier brought the order to advance; another brought the
order to retreat; and the army wandered about without definite aim or
purpose. With loss and shame we retreated from the forts of Silistria, and
the pride of Russia was humbled before the Hapsburg eagle. The soldiers
fought well, but the parade-admiral (Menshikof)—the amphibious hero of

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lost battles—did not know the geography of his own country, and sent his
troops to certain destruction.

* Many people at that time imagined that Count Nesselrode,
who was then Minister for Foreign Affairs, was a traitor to
his adopted country.

"Awake, O Russia! Devoured by foreign enemies, crushed by slavery,
shamefully oppressed by stupid authorities and spies, awaken from your
long sleep of ignorance and apathy! You have been long enough held in
bondage by the successors of the Tartar Khan. Stand forward calmly before
the throne of the despot, and demand from him an account of the national
disaster. Say to him boldly that his throne is not the altar of God, and that
God did not condemn us to be slaves. Russia entrusted to you, O Tsar, the
supreme power, and you were as a God upon earth. And what have you
done? Blinded by ignorance and passion, you have lusted after power and
have forgotten Russia. You have spent your life in reviewing troops, in
modifying uniforms, and in appending your signature to the legislative
projects of ignorant charlatans. You created the despicable race of Press
censors, in order to sleep in peace—in order not to know the wants and not
to hear the groans of the people—in order not to listen to Truth. You buried
Truth, rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, placed a strong
guard over it, and said in the pride of your heart: For her there is no
resurrection! But the third day has dawned, and Truth has arisen from the
dead.
"Stand forward, O Tsar, before the judgment-seat of history and of God!
You have mercilessly trampled Truth under foot, you have denied Freedom,
you have been the slave of your own passions. By your pride and obstinacy
you have exhausted Russia and raised the world in arms against us. Bow
down before your brethren and humble yourself in the dust! Crave pardon
and ask advice! Throw yourself into the arms of the people! There is now
no other salvation!"
The innumerable tirades of which the above is a fair specimen were not
very remarkable for literary merit or political wisdom. For the most part
they were simply bits of bombastic rhetoric couched in doggerel rhyme, and
they have consequently been long since consigned to well-merited oblivion
—so completely that it is now difficult to obtain copies of them.* They
have, however, an historical interest, because they express in a more or less

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exaggerated form the public opinion and prevalent ideas of the educated
classes at that moment. In order to comprehend their real significance, we
must remember that the writers and readers were not a band of conspirators,
but ordinary, respectable, well-intentioned people, who never for a moment
dreamed of embarking in revolutionary designs. It was the same society that
had been a few months before so indifferent to all political questions, and
even now there was no clear conception as to how the loud-sounding
phrases could be translated into action. We can imagine the comical
discomfiture of those who read and listened to these appeals, if the "despot"
had obeyed their summons, and suddenly appeared before them.

* I am indebted for the copies which I possess to friends
who copied and collected these pamphlets at the time.

Was the movement, then, merely an outburst of childish petulance?
Certainly not. The public were really and seriously convinced that things
were all wrong, and they were seriously and enthusiastically desirous that a
new and better order of things should be introduced. It must be said to their
honour that they did not content themselves with accusing and lampooning
the individuals who were supposed to be the chief culprits. On the contrary,
they looked reality boldly in the face, made a public confession of their past
sins, sought conscientiously the causes which had produced the recent
disasters, and endeavoured to find means by which such calamities might
be prevented in the future. The public feeling and aspirations were not
strong enough to conquer the traditional respect for the Imperial will and
create an open opposition to the Autocratic Power, but they were strong
enough to do great things by aiding the Government, if the Emperor
voluntarily undertook a series of radical reforms.
What Nicholas would have done, had he lived, in face of this national
awakening, it is difficult to say. He declared, indeed, that he could not
change, and we can readily believe that his proud spirit would have scorned
to make concessions to the principles which he had always condemned; but
he gave decided indications in the last days of his life that his old faith in
his system was somewhat shaken, and he did not exhort his son to persevere
in the path along which he himself had forced his way with such obstinate
consistency. It is useless, however, to speculate on possibilities. Whilst the
Government had still to concentrate all its energies on the defence of the

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country, the Iron Tsar died, and was succeeded by his son, a man of a very
different type.
Of a kind-hearted, humane disposition, sincerely desirous of maintaining
the national honour, but singularly free from military ambition and imbued
with no fanatical belief in the drill-sergeant system of government,
Alexander II. was by no means insensible to the spirit of the time. He had,
however, none of the sentimental enthusiasm for liberal institutions which
had characterised his uncle, Alexander I. On the contrary, he had inherited
from his father a strong dislike to sentimentalism and rhetoric of all kinds.
This dislike, joined to a goodly portion of sober common-sense, a limited
confidence in his own judgment, and a consciousness of enormous
responsibility, prevented him from being carried away by the prevailing
excitement. With all that was generous and humane in the movement he
thoroughly sympathised, and he allowed the popular ideas and aspirations
to find free utterance; but he did not at once commit himself to any definite
policy, and carefully refrained from all exaggerated expressions of
reforming zeal.
As soon, however, as peace had been concluded, there were unmistakable
symptoms that the rigorously repressive system of Nicholas was about to be
abandoned. In the manifesto announcing the termination of hostilities the
Emperor expressed his conviction that by the combined efforts of the
Government and the people, the public administration would be improved,
and that justice and mercy would reign in the courts of law. Apparently as a
preparation for this great work, to be undertaken by the Tsar and his people
in common, the ministers began to take the public into their confidence, and
submitted to public criticism many official data which had hitherto been
regarded as State secrets. The Minister of the Interior, for instance, in his
annual report, spoke almost in the tone of a penitent, and confessed openly
that the morality of the officials under his orders left much to be desired. He
declared that the Emperor now showed a paternal confidence in his people,
and as a proof of this he mentioned the significant fact that 9,000 persons
had been liberated from police supervision. The other branches of the
Administration underwent a similar transformation. The haughty, dictatorial
tone which had hitherto been used by superiors to their subordinates, and by
all ranks of officials to the public, was replaced by one of considerate
politeness. About the same time those of the Decembrists who were still
alive were pardoned. The restrictions regarding the number of students in

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each university were abolished, the difficulty of obtaining foreign passports
was removed, and the Press censors became singularly indulgent. Though
no decided change had been made in the laws, it was universally felt that
the spirit of Nicholas was no more.
The public, anxiously seeking after a sign, readily took these symptoms
of change as a complete confirmation of their ardent hopes, and leaped at
once to the conclusion that a vast, all-embracing system of radical reform
was about to be undertaken—not secretly by the Administration, as had
been the custom in the preceding reign when any little changes had to be
made, but publicly, by the Government and the people in common. "The
heart trembles with joy," said one of the leading organs of the Press, "in
expectation of the great social reforms that are about to be effected—
reforms that are thoroughly in accordance with the spirit, the wishes, and
the expectations of the public." "The old harmony and community of
feeling," said another, "which has always existed between the government
and the people, save during short exceptional periods, has been fully re-
established. The absence of all sentiment of caste, and the feeling of
common origin and brotherhood which binds all classes of the Russian
people into a homogeneous whole, will enable Russia to accomplish
peacefully and without effort not only those great reforms which cost
Europe centuries of struggle and bloodshed, but also many which the
nations of the West are still unable to accomplish, in consequence of feudal
traditions and caste prejudices." The past was depicted in the blackest
colours, and the nation was called upon to begin a new and glorious epoch
of its history. "We have to struggle," it was said, "in the name of the highest
truth against egotism and the puny interests of the moment; and we ought to
prepare our children from their infancy to take part in that struggle which
awaits every honest man. We have to thank the war for opening our eyes to
the dark sides of our political and social organisation, and it is now our duty
to profit by the lesson. But it must not be supposed that the Government
can, single-handed, remedy the defects. The destinies of Russia are, as it
were, a stranded vessel which the captain and crew cannot move, and which
nothing, indeed, but the rising tide of the national life can raise and float."
Hearts beat quicker at the sound of these calls to action. Many heard this
new teaching, if we may believe a contemporary authority, "with tears in
their eyes"; then, "raising boldly their heads, they made a solemn vow that
they would act honourably, perseveringly, fearlessly." Some of those who

Page 441

had formerly yielded to the force of circumstances now confessed their
misdemeanours with bitterness of heart. "Tears of repentance," said a
popular poet, "give relief, and call us to new exploits." Russia was
compared to a strong giant who awakes from sleep, stretches his brawny
limbs, collects his thoughts, and prepares to atone for his long inactivity by
feats of untold prowess. All believed, or at least assumed, that the
recognition of defects would necessarily entail their removal. When an
actor in one of the St. Petersburg theatres shouted from the stage, "Let us
proclaim throughout all Russia that the time has come for tearing up evil by
the roots!" the audience gave way to the most frantic enthusiasm.
"Altogether a joyful time," says one who took part in the excitement, "as
when, after the long winter, the genial breath of spring glides over the cold,
petrified earth, and nature awakens from her deathlike sleep. Speech, long
restrained by police and censorial regulations, now flows smoothly,
majestically, like a mighty river that has just been freed from ice."
Under these influences a multitude of newspapers and periodicals were
founded, and the current literature entirely changed its character. The purely
literary and historical questions which had hitherto engaged the attention of
the reading public were thrown aside and forgotten, unless they could be
made to illustrate some principle of political or social science. Criticisms on
style and diction, explanations of aesthetic principles, metaphysical
discussions—all this seemed miserable trifling to men who wished to
devote themselves to gigantic practical interests. "Science," it was said, "has
now descended from the heights of philosophic abstraction into the arena of
real life." The periodicals were accordingly filled with articles on railways,
banks, free-trade, education, agriculture, communal institutions, local self-
government, joint-stock companies, and with crushing philippics against
personal and national vanity, inordinate luxury, administrative tyranny, and
the habitual peculation of the officials. This last-named subject received
special attention. During the preceding reign any attempt to criticise
publicly the character or acts of an official was regarded as a very heinous
offence; now there was a deluge of sketches, tales, comedies, and
monologues, describing the corruption of the Administration, and
explaining the ingenious devices by which the tchinovniks increased their
scanty salaries. The public would read nothing that had not a direct or
indirect bearing on the questions of the day, and whatever had such a
bearing was read with interest. It did not seem at all strange that a drama

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should be written in defence of free-trade, or a poem in advocacy of some
peculiar mode of taxation; that an author should expound his political ideas
in a tale, and his antagonist reply by a comedy. A few men of the old school
protested feebly against this "prostitution of art," but they received little
attention, and the doctrine that art should be cultivated for its own sake was
scouted as an invention of aristocratic indolence. Here is an ipsa pinxit of
the literature of the time: "Literature has come to look at Russia with her
own eyes, and sees that the idyllic romantic personages which the poets
formerly loved to describe have no objective existence. Having taken off
her French glove, she offers her hand to the rude, hard-working labourer,
and observing lovingly Russian village life, she feels herself in her native
land. The writers of the present have analysed the past, and, having
separated themselves from aristocratic litterateurs and aristocratic society,
have demolished their former idols."
By far the most influential periodical at the commencement of the
movement was the Kolokol, or Bell, a fortnightly journal published in
London by Herzen, who was at that time an important personage among the
political refugees. Herzen was a man of education and culture, with ultra-
radical opinions, and not averse to using revolutionary methods of reform
when he considered them necessary. His intimate relations with many of the
leading men in Russia enabled him to obtain secret information of the most
important and varied kind, and his sparkling wit, biting satire, and clear,
terse, brilliant style secured him a large number of readers. He seemed to
know everything that was done in the ministries and even in the Cabinet of
the Emperor,* and he exposed most mercilessly every abuse that came to
his knowledge. We who are accustomed to free political discussion can
hardly form a conception of the avidity with which his articles were read,
and the effect which they produced. Though strictly prohibited by the Press
censure, the Kolokol found its way across the frontier in thousands of
copies, and was eagerly perused and commented on by all ranks of the
educated classes. The Emperor himself received it regularly, and high-
priced delinquents examined it with fear and trembling. In this way Herzen
was for some years, though an exile, an important political personage, and
did much to awaken and keep up the reform enthusiasm.

* As an illustration of this, the following anecdote is
told: One number of the Kolokol contained a violent attack
on an important personage of the court, and the accused, or

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some one of his friends, considered it advisable to have a
copy specially printed for the Emperor without the
objectionable article. The Emperor did not at first
discover the trick, but shortly afterwards he received from
London a polite note containing the article which had been
omitted, and informing him how he had been deceived.

But where were the Conservatives all this time? How came it that for two
or three years no voice was raised and no protest made even against the
rhetorical exaggerations of the new-born liberalism? Where were the
representatives of the old regime, who had been so thoroughly imbued with
the spirit of Nicholas? Where were those ministers who had systematically
extinguished the least indication of private initiative, those "satraps" who
had stamped out the least symptom of insubordination or discontent, those
Press censors who had diligently suppressed the mildest expression of
liberal opinion, those thousands of well-intentioned proprietors who had
regarded as dangerous free-thinkers and treasonable republicans all who
ventured to express dissatisfaction with the existing state of things? A short
time before, the Conservatives composed at least nine-tenths of the upper
classes, and now they had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared.
It is scarcely necessary to say that in a country accustomed to political
life, such a sudden, unopposed revolution in public opinion could not
possibly take place. The key to the mystery lies in the fact that for centuries
Russia had known nothing of political life or political parties. Those who
were sometimes called Conservatives were in reality not at all
Conservatives in our sense of the term. If we say that they had a certain
amount of conservatism, we must add that it was of the latent, passive,
unreasoned kind—the fruit of indolence and apathy. Their political creed
had but one article: Thou shalt love the Tsar with all thy might, and
carefully abstain from all resistance to his will—especially when it happens
that the Tsar is a man of the Nicholas type. So long as Nicholas lived they
had passively acquiesced in his system—active acquiescence had been
neither demanded nor desired—but when he died, the system of which he
was the soul died with him. What then could they seek to defend? They
were told that the system which they had been taught to regard as the sheet-
anchor of the State was in reality the chief cause of the national disasters;
and to this they could make no reply, because they had no better
explanation of their own to offer. They were convinced that the Russian
soldier was the best soldier in the world, and they knew that in the recent
war the army had not been victorious; the system, therefore, must be to

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blame. They were told that a series of gigantic reforms was necessary in
order to restore Russia to her proper place among the nations; and to this
they could make no answer, for they had never studied such abstract
questions. And one thing they did know: that those who hesitated to admit
the necessity of gigantic reforms were branded by the Press as ignorant,
narrow-minded, prejudiced, and egotistical, and were held up to derision as
men who did not know the most elementary principles of political and
economic science. Freely expressed public opinion was such a new
phenomenon in Russia that the Press was able for some time to exercise a
"Liberal" tyranny scarcely less severe than the "Conservative" tyranny of
the censors in the preceding reign. Men who would have stood fire gallantly
on the field of battle quailed before the poisoned darts of Herzen in the
Kolokol. Under such circumstances, even the few who possessed some
vague Conservative convictions refrained from publicly expressing them.
The men who had played a more or less active part during the preceding
reign, and who might therefore be expected to have clearer and deeper
convictions, were specially incapable of offering opposition to the
prevailing Liberal enthusiasm. Their Conservatism was of quite as limp a
kind as that of the landed proprietors who were not in the public service, for
under Nicholas the higher a man was placed the less likely was he to have
political convictions of any kind outside the simple political creed above
referred to. Besides this, they belonged to that class which was for the
moment under the anathema of public opinion, and they had drawn direct
personal advantage from the system which was now recognised as the chief
cause of the national disasters.
For a time the name of tchinovnik became a term of reproach and
derision, and the position of those who bore it was comically painful. They
strove to prove that, though they held a post in the public service, they were
entirely free from the tchinovnik spirit—that there was nothing of the
genuine tchinovnik about them. Those who had formerly paraded their tchin
(official rank) on all occasions, in season and out of season, became half
ashamed to admit that they had the rank of General; for the title no longer
commanded respect, and had become associated with all that was
antiquated, formal, and stupid. Among the young generation it was used
most disrespectfully as equivalent to "pompous blockhead." Zealous
officials who had lately regarded the acquisition of Stars and Orders as
among the chief ends of man, were fain to conceal those hard-won trophies,

Page 445

lest some cynical "Liberal" might notice them and make them the butt of his
satire. "Look at the depth of humiliation to which you have brought the
country"—such was the chorus of reproach that was ever ringing in their
ears—"with your red tape, your Chinese formalism, and your principle of
lifeless, unreasoning, mechanical obedience! You asserted constantly that
you were the only true patriots, and branded with the name of traitor those
who warned you of the insane folly of your conduct. You see now what it
has all come to. The men whom you helped to send to the mines turn out to
have been the true patriots."*

* It was a common saying at that time that nearly all the
best men in Russia had spent a part of their lives in
Siberia, and it was proposed to publish a biographical
dictionary of remarkable men, in which every article was to
end thus: "Exiled to —— in 18—." I am not aware how far
the project was seriously entertained, but, of course, the
book was never published.

And to these reproaches what could they reply? Like a child who has in
his frolics inadvertently set the house on fire, they could only look contrite,
and say they did not mean it. They had simply accepted without criticism
the existing order of things, and ranged themselves among those who were
officially recognised as "the well-intentioned." If they had always avoided
the Liberals, and perhaps helped to persecute them, it was simply because
all "well-intentioned" people said that Liberals were "restless" and
dangerous to the State. Those who were not convinced of their errors
simply kept silence, but the great majority passed over to the ranks of the
Progressists, and many endeavoured to redeem their past by showing
extreme zeal for the Liberal cause.
In explanation of this extraordinary outburst of reform enthusiasm, we
must further remember that the Russian educated classes, in spite of the
severe northern climate which is supposed to make the blood circulate
slowly, are extremely impulsive. They are fettered by no venerable
historical prejudices, and are wonderfully sensitive to the seductive
influence of grandiose projects, especially when these excite the patriotic
feelings. Then there was the simple force of reaction—the rebound which
naturally followed the terrific compression of the preceding reign. Without
disrespect, the Russians of that time may be compared to schoolboys who
have just escaped from the rigorous discipline of a severe schoolmaster. In
the first moments of freedom it was supposed that there would be no more

Page 446

discipline or compulsion. The utmost respect was to be shown to "human
dignity," and every Russian was to act spontaneously and zealously at the
great work of national regeneration. All thirsted for reforming activity. The
men in authority were inundated with projects of reform—some of them
anonymous, and others from obscure individuals; some of them practical,
and very many wildly fantastic. Even the grammarians showed their
sympathy with the spirit of the time by proposing to expel summarily all
redundant letters from the Russian alphabet!
The fact that very few people had clear, precise ideas as to what was to
be done did not prevent, but rather tended to increase, the reform
enthusiasm. All had at least one common feeling—dislike to what had
previously existed. It was only when it became necessary to forsake pure
negation, and to create something, that the conceptions became clearer, and
a variety of opinions appeared. At the first moment there was merely
unanimity in negation, and an impulsive enthusiasm for beneficent reforms
in general.
The first specific proposals were direct deductions from the lessons
taught by the war. The war had shown in a terrible way the disastrous
consequences of having merely primitive means of communication; the
Press and the public began, accordingly, to speak about the necessity of
constructing railways, roads and river-steamers. The war had shown that a
country which has not developed its natural resources very soon becomes
exhausted if it has to make a great national effort; accordingly the public
and the Press talked about the necessity of developing the natural resources,
and about the means by which this desirable end might be attained. It had
been shown by the war that a system of education which tends to make men
mere apathetic automata cannot produce even a good army; accordingly the
public and the Press began to discuss the different systems of education and
the numerous questions of pedagogical science. It had been shown by the
war that the best intentions of a Government will necessarily be frustrated if
the majority of the officials are dishonest or incapable; accordingly the
public and the Press began to speak about the paramount necessity of
reforming the Administration in all its branches.
It must not, however, be supposed that in thus laying to heart the lessons
taught by the war and endeavouring to profit by them, the Russians were
actuated by warlike feelings, and desired to avenge themselves as soon as

Page 447

possible on their victorious enemies. On the contrary, the whole movement
and the spirit which animated it were eminently pacific. Prince Gortchakof's
saying, "La Russie ne boude pas, elle se recueille," was more than a
diplomatic repartee—it was a true and graphic statement of the case.
Though the Russians are very inflammable, and can be very violent when
their patriotic feelings are aroused, they are, individually and as a nation,
singularly free from rancour and the spirit of revenge. After the termination
of hostilities they really bore little malice towards the Western Powers,
except towards Austria, which was believed to have been treacherous and
ungrateful to the country that had saved her in 1849. Their patriotism now
took the form, not of revenge, but of a desire to raise their country to the
level of the Western nations. If they thought of military matters at all, they
assumed that military power would be obtained as a natural and inevitable
result of high civilisation and good government.
As a first step towards the realisation of the vast schemes contemplated,
voluntary associations began to be formed for industrial and commercial
purposes, and a law was issued for the creation of limited liability
companies. In the space of two years forty-seven companies of this kind
were founded, with a combined capital of 358 millions of roubles. To
understand the full significance of these figures, we must know that from
the founding of the first joint-stock company in 1799 down to 1853 only
twenty-six companies had been formed, and their united capital amounted
only to thirty-two millions of roubles. Thus in the space of two years (1857-
58) eleven times as much capital was subscribed to joint-stock companies
as had been subscribed during half a century previous to the war. The most
exaggerated expectations were entertained as to the national and private
advantages which must necessarily result from these undertakings, and it
became a patriotic duty to subscribe liberally. The periodical literature
depicted in glowing terms the marvellous results that had been obtained in
other countries by the principle of co-operation, and sanguine readers
believed that they had discovered a patriotic way of speedily becoming rich.
These were, however, mere secondary matters, and the public were
anxiously waiting for the Government to begin the grand reforming
campaign. When the educated classes awoke to the necessity of great
reforms, there was no clear conception as to how the great work should be
undertaken. There was so much to be done that it was no easy matter to
decide what should be done first. Administrative, judicial, social,

Page 448

economical, financial, and political reforms seemed all equally pressing.
Gradually, however, it became evident that precedence must be given to the
question of serfage. It was absurd to speak about progress,
humanitarianism, education, self-government, equality in the eye of the law,
and similar matters, so long as one half of the population was excluded
from the enjoyment of ordinary civil rights. So long as serfage existed it
was mere mockery to talk about re-organising Russia according to the latest
results of political and social science. How could a system of even-handed
justice be introduced when twenty millions of the peasantry were subject to
the arbitrary will of the landed proprietors? How could agricultural or
industrial progress be made without free labour? How could the
Government take active measures for the spread of national education when
it had no direct control over one-half of the peasantry? Above all, how
could it be hoped that a great moral regeneration could take place, so long
as the nation voluntarily retained the stigma of serfage and slavery?
All this was very generally felt by the educated classes, but no one
ventured to raise the question until it should be known what were the views
of the Emperor on the subject. How the question was gradually raised, how
it was treated by the nobles, and how it was ultimately solved by the famous
law of February 19th (March 3d), 1861,* I now propose to relate.

* February 19th according to the old style, which is still
used in Russia, and March 3d according to our method of
reckoning.

Page 449

Page 450

CHAPTER XXVIII
THE SERFS

The Rural Population in Ancient Times—The Peasantry in the Eighteenth
Century—How Was This Change Effected?—The Common Explanation
Inaccurate—Serfage the Result of Permanent Economic and Political
Causes—Origin of the Adscriptio Glebae—Its Consequences—Serf
Insurrection—Turning-point in the History of Serfage—Serfage in Russia
and in Western Europe—State Peasants—Numbers and Geographical
Distribution of the Serf Population—Serf Dues—Legal and Actual Power
of the Proprietors—The Serfs' Means of Defence—Fugitives—Domestic
Serfs—Strange Advertisements in the Moscow Gazette—Moral Influence
of Serfage.
Before proceeding to describe the Emancipation, it may be well to
explain briefly how the Russian peasants became serfs, and what serfage in
Russia really was.
In the earliest period of Russian history the rural population was
composed of three distinct classes. At the bottom of the scale stood the
slaves, who were very numerous. Their numbers were continually
augmented by prisoners of war, by freemen who voluntarily sold
themselves as slaves, by insolvent debtors, and by certain categories of
criminals. Immediately above the slaves were the free agricultural
labourers, who had no permanent domicile, but wandered about the country
and settled temporarily where they happened to find work and satisfactory
remuneration. In the third place, distinct from these two classes, and in
some respects higher in the social scale, were the peasants properly so
called.*

* My chief authority for the early history of the peasantry
has been Belaef, "Krestyanye na Rusi," Moscow, 1860; a most
able and conscientious work.

These peasants proper, who may be roughly described as small farmers
or cottiers, were distinguished from the free agricultural labourers in two

Page 451

respects: they were possessors of land in property or usufruct, and they
were members of a rural Commune. The Communes were free primitive
corporations which elected their office-bearers from among the heads of
families, and sent delegates to act as judges or assessors in the Prince's
Court. Some of the Communes possessed land of their own, whilst others
were settled on the estates of the landed proprietors or on the extensive
domains of the monasteries. In the latter case the peasant paid a fixed yearly
rent in money, in produce, or in labour, according to the terms of his
contract with the proprietor or the monastery; but he did not thereby
sacrifice in any way his personal liberty. As soon as he had fulfilled the
engagements stipulated in the contract and had settled accounts with the
owner of the land, he was free to change his domicile as he pleased.
If we turn now from these early times to the eighteenth century, we find
that the position of the rural population has entirely changed in the interval.
The distinction between slaves, agricultural labourers, and peasants has
completely disappeared. All three categories have melted together into a
common class, called serfs, who are regarded as the property of the landed
proprietors or of the State. "The proprietors sell their peasants and domestic
servants not even in families, but one by one, like cattle, as is done nowhere
else in the whole world, from which practice there is not a little wailing."*
And yet the Government, whilst professing to regret the existence of the
practice, takes no energetic measures to prevent it. On the contrary, it
deprives the serfs of all legal protection, and expressly commands that if
any serf shall dare to present a petition against his master, he shall be
punished with the knout and transported for life to the mines of Nertchinsk.
(Ukaz of August 22d, 1767.**)

* These words are taken from an Imperial ukaz of April 15th,
1721. Polnoye Sobranye Zakonov, No. 3,770.

** This is an ukaz of the liberal and tolerant Catherine!
How she reconciled it with her respect and admiration for
Beccaria's humane views on criminal law she does not
explain.

How did this important change take place, and how is it to be explained?
If we ask any educated Russian who has never specially occupied himself
with historical investigations regarding the origin of serfage in Russia, he
will probably reply somewhat in this fashion:

Page 452

"In Russia slavery has never existed (!), and even serfage in the West-
European sense has never been recognised by law! In ancient times the
rural population was completely free, and every peasant might change his
domicile on St. George's Day—that is to say, at the end of the agricultural
year. This right of migration was abolished by Tsar Boris Godunof—who,
by the way, was half a Tartar and more than half a usurper—and herein lies
the essence of serfage in the Russian sense. The peasants have never been
the property of the landed proprietors, but have always been personally
free; and the only legal restriction on their liberty was that they were not
allowed to change their domicile without the permission of the proprietor. If
so-called serfs were sometimes sold, the practice was simply an abuse not
justified by legislation."
This simple explanation, in which may be detected a note of patriotic
pride, is almost universally accepted in Russia; but it contains, like most
popular conceptions of the distant past, a curious mixture of fact and
fiction. Serious historical investigation tends to show that the power of the
proprietors over the peasants came into existence, not suddenly, as the result
of an ukaz, but gradually, as a consequence of permanent economic and
political causes, and that Boris Godunof was not more to blame than many
of his predecessors and successors.*

* See especially Pobedonostsef, in the Russki Vestnik, 1858,
No. 11, and "Istoritcheskiya izsledovaniya i statyi" (St.
Petersburg, 1876), by the same author; also Pogodin, in the
Russkaya Beseda, 1858, No. 4.

Although the peasants in ancient Russia were free to wander about as
they chose, there appeared at a very early period—long before the reign of
Boris Godunof—a decided tendency in the Princes, in the proprietors, and
in the Communes, to prevent migration. This tendency will be easily
understood if we remember that land without labourers is useless, and that
in Russia at that time the population was small in comparison with the
amount of reclaimed and easily reclaimable land. The Prince desired to
have as many inhabitants as possible in his principality, because the amount
of his regular revenues depended on the number of the population. The
landed proprietor desired to have as many peasants as possible on his estate,
to till for him the land which he reserved for his own use, and to pay him
for the remainder a yearly rent in money, produce, or labour. The free
Communes desired to have a number of members sufficient to keep the

Page 453

whole of the Communal land under cultivation, because each Commune
had to pay yearly to the Prince a fixed sum in money or agricultural
produce, and the greater the number of able-bodied members, the less each
individual had to pay. To use the language of political economy, the Princes,
the landed proprietors, and the free Communes all appeared as buyers in the
labour market; and the demand was far in excess of the supply. Nowadays
when young colonies or landed proprietors in an outlying corner of the
world are similarly in need of labour, they seek to supply the want by
organising a regular system of importing labourers—using illegal violent
means, such as kidnapping expeditions, merely as an exceptional expedient.
In old Russia any such regularly organised system was impossible, and
consequently illegal or violent measures were not the exception, but the
rule. The chief practical advantage of the frequent military expeditions for
those who took part in them was the acquisition of prisoners of war, who
were commonly transformed into slaves by their captors. If it be true, as
some assert, that only unbaptised prisoners were legally considered lawful
booty, it is certain that in practice, before the unification of the principalities
under the Tsars of Moscow, little distinction was made in this respect
between unbaptised foreigners and Orthodox Russians.* A similar method
was sometimes employed for the acquisition of free peasants: the more
powerful proprietors organised kidnapping expeditions, and carried off by
force the peasants settled on the land of their weaker neighbours.

* On this subject see Tchitcherin, "Opyty po istorii
Russkago prava," Moscow, 1858, p. 162 et seq.; and
Lokhvitski, "O plennykh po drevnemu Russkomu pravu," Moscow,
1855.

Under these circumstances it was only natural that those who possessed
this valuable commodity should do all in their power to keep it. Many, if
not all, of the free Communes adopted the simple measure of refusing to
allow a member to depart until he had found some one to take his place.
The proprietors never, so far as we know, laid down formally such a
principle, but in practice they did all in their power to retain the peasants
actually settled on their estates. For this purpose some simply employed
force, whilst others acted under cover of legal formalities. The peasant who
accepted land from a proprietor rarely brought with him the necessary
implements, cattle, and capital to begin at once his occupations, and to feed
himself and his family till the ensuing harvest. He was obliged, therefore, to

Page 454

borrow from his landlord, and the debt thus contracted was easily converted
into a means of preventing his departure if he wished to change his
domicile. We need not enter into further details. The proprietors were the
capitalists of the time. Frequent bad harvests, plagues, fires, military raids,
and similar misfortunes often reduced even prosperous peasants to beggary.
The muzhik was probably then, as now, only too ready to accept a loan
without taking the necessary precautions for repaying it. The laws relating
to debt were terribly severe, and there was no powerful judicial organisation
to protect the weak. If we remember all this, we shall not be surprised to
learn that a considerable part of the peasantry were practically serfs before
serfage was recognised by law.
So long as the country was broken up into independent principalities, and
each land-owner was almost an independent Prince on his estate, the
peasants easily found a remedy for these abuses in flight. They fled to a
neighbouring proprietor who could protect them from their former landlord
and his claims, or they took refuge in a neighbouring principality, where
they were, of course, still safer. All this was changed when the independent
principalities were transformed into the Tsardom of Muscovy. The Tsars
had new reasons for opposing the migration of the peasants and new means
for preventing it. The old Princes had simply given grants of land to those
who served them, and left the grantee to do with his land what seemed good
to him; the Tsars, on the contrary, gave to those who served them merely the
usufruct of a certain quantity of land, and carefully proportioned the
quantity to the rank and the obligations of the receiver. In this change there
was plainly a new reason for fixing the peasants to the soil. The real value
of a grant depended not so much on the amount of land as on the number of
peasants settled on it, and hence any migration of the population was
tantamount to a removal of the ancient landmarks—that is to say, to a
disturbance of the arrangements made by the Tsar. Suppose, for instance,
that the Tsar granted to a Boyar or some lesser dignitary an estate on which
were settled twenty peasant families, and that afterwards ten of these
emigrated to neighbouring proprietors. In this case the recipient might justly
complain that he had lost half of his estate—though the amount of land was
in no way diminished—and that he was consequently unable to fulfil his
obligations. Such complaints would be rarely, if ever, made by the great
dignitaries, for they had the means of attracting peasants to their estates;*
but the small proprietors had good reason to complain, and the Tsar was

Page 455

bound to remove their grievances. The attaching of the peasants to the soil
was, in fact, the natural consequence of feudal tenures—an integral part of
the Muscovite political system. The Tsar compelled the nobles to serve him,
and was unable to pay them in money. He was obliged, therefore, to procure
for them some other means of livelihood. Evidently the simplest method of
solving the difficulty was to give them land, with a certain number of
labourers, and to prevent the labourers from migrating.

* There are plain indications in the documents of the time
that the great dignitaries were at first hostile to the
adscriptio glebae. We find a similar phenomenon at a much
more recent date in Little Russia. Long after serfage had
been legalised in that region by Catherine II., the great
proprietors, such as Rumyantsef, Razumofski, Bezborodko,
continued to attract to their estates the peasants of the
smaller proprietors. See the article of Pogodin in the
Russkaya Beseda, 1858, No. 4, p. 154.

Towards the free Communes the Tsar had to act in the same way for
similar reasons. The Communes, like the nobles, had obligations to the
Sovereign, and could not fulfil them if the peasants were allowed to migrate
from one locality to another. They were, in a certain sense, the property of
the Tsar, and it was only natural that the Tsar should do for himself what he
had done for his nobles.
With these new reasons for fixing the peasants to the soil came, as has
been said, new means of preventing migration. Formerly it was an easy
matter to flee to a neighbouring principality, but now all the principalities
were combined under one ruler, and the foundations of a centralised
administration were laid. Severe fugitive laws were issued against those
who attempted to change their domicile and against the proprietors who
should harbour the runaways. Unless the peasant chose to face the
difficulties of "squatting" in the inhospitable northern forests, or resolved to
brave the dangers of the steppe, he could nowhere escape the heavy hand of
Moscow.*

* The above account of the origin of serfage in Russia is
founded on a careful examination of the evidence which we
possess on the subject, but I must not conceal the fact that
some of the statements are founded on inference rather than
on direct, unequivocal documentary evidence. The whole
question is one of great difficulty, and will in all
probability not be satisfactorily solved until a large
number of the old local Land-Registers (Pistsoviya Knigi)
have been published and carefully studied.

Page 456

The indirect consequences of thus attaching the peasants to the soil did
not at once become apparent. The serf retained all the civil rights he had
hitherto enjoyed, except that of changing his domicile. He could still appear
before the courts of law as a free man, freely engage in trade or industry,
enter into all manner of contracts, and rent land for cultivation.
But as time wore on, the change in the legal relation between the two
classes became apparent in real life. In attaching the peasantry to the soil,
the Government had been so thoroughly engrossed with the direct financial
aim that it entirely overlooked, or wilfully shut its eyes to, the ulterior
consequences which must necessarily flow from the policy it adopted. It
was evident that as soon as the relation between proprietor and peasant was
removed from the region of voluntary contract by being rendered
indissoluble, the weaker of the two parties legally tied together must fall
completely under the power of the stronger, unless energetically protected
by the law and the Administration. To this inevitable consequence the
Government paid no attention. So far from endeavouring to protect the
peasantry from the oppression of the proprietors, it did not even determine
by law the mutual obligations which ought to exist between the two classes.
Taking advantage of this omission, the proprietors soon began to impose
whatever obligations they thought fit; and as they had no legal means of
enforcing fulfilment, they gradually introduced a patriarchal jurisdiction
similar to that which they exercised over their slaves, with fines and
corporal punishment as means of coercion. From this they ere long
proceeded a step further, and began to sell their peasants without the land
on which they were settled. At first this was merely a flagrant abuse
unsanctioned by law, for the peasant had never been declared the private
property of the landed proprietor; but the Government tacitly sanctioned the
practice, and even exacted dues on such sales, as on the sale of slaves.
Finally the right to sell peasants without land was formally recognised by
various Imperial ukazes.*

* For instance, the ukazes of October 13th, 1675, and June
25th, 1682. See Belaef, pp. 203-209.

The old Communal organisation still existed on the estates of the
proprietors, and had never been legally deprived of its authority, but it was
now powerless to protect the members. The proprietor could easily

Page 457

overcome any active resistance by selling or converting into domestic
servants the peasants who dared to oppose his will.
The peasantry had thus sunk to the condition of serfs, practically
deprived of legal protection and subject to the arbitrary will of the
proprietors; but they were still in some respects legally and actually
distinguished from the slaves on the one hand and the "free wandering
people" on the other. These distinctions were obliterated by Peter the Great
and his immediate successors.
To effect his great civil and military reforms, Peter required an annual
revenue such as his predecessors had never dreamed of, and he was
consequently always on the look-out for some new object of taxation. When
looking about for this purpose, his eye naturally fell on the slaves, the
domestic servants, and the free agricultural labourers. None of these classes
paid taxes—a fact which stood in flagrant contradiction with his
fundamental principle of polity, that every subject should in some way
serve the State. He caused, therefore, a national census to be taken, in which
all the various classes of the rural population—slaves, domestic servants,
agricultural labourers, peasants—should be inscribed in one category; and
he imposed equally on all the members of this category a poll-tax, in lieu of
the former land-tax, which had lain exclusively on the peasants. To
facilitate the collection of this tax the proprietors were made responsible for
their serfs; and the "free wandering people" who did not wish to enter the
army were ordered, under pain of being sent to the galleys, to inscribe
themselves as members of a Commune or as serfs to some proprietor.
These measures had a considerable influence, if not on the actual position
of the peasantry, at least on the legal conceptions regarding them. By
making the proprietor pay the poll-tax for his serfs, as if they were slaves or
cattle, the law seemed to sanction the idea that they were part of his goods
and chattels. Besides this, it introduced the entirely new principle that any
member of the rural population not legally attached to the land or to a
proprietor should be regarded as a vagrant, and treated accordingly. Thus
the principle that every subject should in some way serve the State had
found its complete realisation. There was no longer any room in Russia for
free men.
The change in the position of the peasantry, together with the hardships
and oppression by which it was accompanied, naturally increased

Page 458

fugitivism and vagrancy. Thousands of serfs ran away from their masters
and fled to the steppe or sought enrolment in the army. To prevent this the
Government considered it necessary to take severe and energetic measures.
The serfs were forbidden to enlist without the permission of their masters,
and those who persisted in presenting themselves for enrolment were to be
beaten "cruelly" (zhestoko) with the knout, and sent to the mines.* The
proprietors, on the other hand, received the right to transport without trial
their unruly serfs to Siberia, and even to send them to the mines for life.**

* Ukaz of June 2d, 1742.

** See ukaz of January 17th, 1765, and of January 28th,
1766.

If these stringent measures had any effect it was not of long duration, for
there soon appeared among the serfs a still stronger spirit of discontent and
insubordination, which threatened to produce a general agrarian rising, and
actually did create a movement resembling in many respects the Jacquerie
in France and the Peasant War in Germany. A glance at the causes of this
movement will help us to understand the real nature of serfage in Russia.
Up to this point serfage had, in spite of its flagrant abuses, a certain
theoretical justification. It was, as we have seen, merely a part of a general
political system in which obligatory service was imposed on all classes of
the population. The serfs served the nobles in order that the nobles might
serve the Tsar. In 1762 this theory was entirely overturned by a manifesto of
Peter III. abolishing the obligatory service of the Noblesse. According to
strict justice this act ought to have been followed by the liberation of the
serfs, for if the nobles were no longer obliged to serve the State they had no
just claim to the service of the peasants. The Government had so completely
forgotten the original meaning of serfage that it never thought of carrying
out the measure to its logical consequences, but the peasantry held
tenaciously to the ancient conceptions, and looked impatiently for a second
manifesto liberating them from the power of the proprietors. Reports were
spread that such a manifesto really existed, and was being concealed by the
nobles. A spirit of insubordination accordingly appeared among the rural
population, and local insurrections broke out in several parts of the Empire.
At this critical moment Peter III. was dethroned and assassinated by a
Court conspiracy. The peasants, who, of course, knew nothing of the real
motives of the conspirators, supposed that the Tsar had been assassinated by

Page 459

those who wished to preserve serfage, and believed him to be a martyr in
the cause of Emancipation. At the news of the catastrophe their hopes of
Emancipation fell, but soon they were revived by new rumours. The Tsar, it
was said, had escaped from the conspirators and was in hiding. Soon he
would appear among his faithful peasants, and with their aid would regain
his throne and punish the wicked oppressors. Anxiously he was awaited,
and at last the glad tidings came that he had appeared in the Don country,
that thousands of Cossacks had joined his standard, that he was everywhere
putting the proprietors to death without mercy, and that he would soon
arrive in the ancient capital!
Peter III. was in reality in his grave, but there was a terrible element of
truth in these reports. A pretender, a Cossack called Pugatchef, had really
appeared on the Don, and had assumed the role which the peasants expected
the late Tsar to play. Advancing through the country of the Lower Volga, he
took several places of importance, put to death all the proprietors he could
find, defeated on more than one occasion the troops sent against him, and
threatened to advance into the heart of the Empire. It seemed as if the old
troublous times were about to be renewed—as if the country was once more
to be pillaged by those wild Cossacks of the southern steppe. But the
pretender showed himself incapable of playing the part he had assumed. His
inhuman cruelty estranged many who would otherwise have followed him,
and he was too deficient in decision and energy to take advantage of
favourable circumstances. If it be true that he conceived the idea of creating
a peasant empire (muzhitskoe tsarstvo), he was not the man to realise such a
scheme. After a series of mistakes and defeats he was taken prisoner, and
the insurrection was quelled.*

*Whilst living among the Bashkirs of the province of Samara
in 1872 I found some interesting traditions regarding this
pretender. Though nearly a century had elapsed since his
death (1775), his name, his personal appearance, and his
exploits were well known even to the younger generation. My
informants firmly believed that he was not an impostor, but
the genuine Tsar, dethroned by his ambitious consort, and
that he never was taken prisoner, but "went away into
foreign lands." When I asked whether he was still alive,
and whether he might not one day return, they replied that
they did not know.

Meanwhile Peter III. had been succeeded by his consort, Catherine II. As
she had no legal right to the throne, and was by birth a foreigner, she could
not gain the affections of the people, and was obliged to court the favour of

Page 460

the Noblesse. In such a difficult position she could not venture to apply her
humane principles to the question of serfage. Even during the first years of
her reign, when she had no reason to fear agrarian disturbances, she
increased rather than diminished the power of the proprietors over their
serfs, and the Pugatchef affair confirmed her in this line of policy. During
her reign serfage may be said to have reached its climax. The serfs were
regarded by the law as part of the master's immovable property*—as part of
the working capital of the estate—and as such they were bought, sold, and
given as presents** in hundreds and thousands, sometimes with the land,
and sometimes without it, sometimes in families, and sometimes
individually. The only legal restriction was that they should not be offered
for sale at the time of the conscription, and that they should at no time be
sold publicly by auction, because such a custom was considered as
"unbecoming in a European State." In all other respects the serfs might be
treated as private property; and this view is to be found not only in the
legislation, but also in the popular conceptions. It became customary—a
custom that continued down to the year 1861—to compute a noble's
fortune, not by his yearly revenue or the extent of his estate, but by the
number of his serfs. Instead of saying that a man had so many hundreds or
thousands a year, or so many acres, it was commonly said that he had so
many hundreds or thousands of "souls." And over these "souls" he exercised
the most unlimited authority. The serfs had no legal means of self-defence.
The Government feared that the granting to them of judicial or
administrative protection would inevitably awaken in them a spirit of
insubordination, and hence it was ordered that those who presented
complaints should be punished with the knout and sent to the mines.*** It
was only in extreme cases, when some instance of atrocious cruelty
happened to reach the ears of the Sovereign, that the authorities interfered
with the proprietor's jurisdiction, and these cases had not the slightest
influence on the proprietors in general.****

* See ukaz of October 7th, 1792.

** As an example of making presents of serfs, the following
may be cited. Count Panin presented some of his
subordinates for an Imperial recompense, and on receiving a
refusal, made them a present of 4000 serfs from his own
estates.—Belaef, p. 320.

*** See the ukazes of August 22d, 1767, and March 30th,
1781.

Page 461

**** Perhaps the most horrible case on record is that of a
certain lady called Saltykof, who was brought to justice in
1768. According to the ukaz regarding her crimes, she had
killed by inhuman tortures in the course of ten or eleven
years about a hundred of her serfs, chiefly of the female
sex, and among them several young girls of eleven and twelve
years of age. According to popular belief her cruelty
proceeded from cannibal propensities, but this was not
confirmed by the judicial investigation. Details in the
Russki Arkhiv, 1865, pp. 644-652. The atrocities practised
on the estate of Count Araktcheyef, the favourite of
Alexander I. at the commencement of last century, have been
frequently described, and are scarcely less revolting.

The last years of the eighteenth century may be regarded as the turning-
point in the history of serfage. Up till that time the power of the proprietors
had steadily increased, and the area of serfage had rapidly expanded. Under
the Emperor Paul (1796-1801) we find the first decided symptoms of a
reaction. He regarded the proprietors as his most efficient officers of police,
but he desired to limit their authority, and for this purpose issued an ukaz to
the effect that the serfs should not be forced to work for their masters more
than three days in the week. With the accession of Alexander I., in 1801,
commenced a long series of abortive projects for a general emancipation,
and endless attempts to correct the more glaring abuses; and during the
reign of Nicholas no less than six committees were formed at different
times to consider the question. But the practical result of these efforts was
extremely small. The custom of giving grants of land with peasants was
abolished; certain slight restrictions were placed on the authority of the
proprietors; a number of the worst specimens of the class were removed
from the administration of their estates; a few who were convicted of
atrocious cruelty were exiled to Siberia;* and some thousands of serfs were
actually emancipated; but no decisive radical measures were attempted, and
the serfs did not receive even the right of making formal complaints.
Serfage had, in fact, come to be regarded as a vital part of the State
organisation, and the only sure basis for autocracy. It was therefore treated
tenderly, and the rights and protection accorded by various ukazes were
almost entirely illusory.

*Speranski, for instance, when Governor of the province of
Penza, brought to justice, among others, a proprietor who
had caused one of his serfs to be flogged to death, and a
lady who had murdered a serf boy by pricking him with a
pen-knife because he had neglected to take proper care of a tame
rabbit committed to his charge!—Korff, "Zhizn Speranskago,"
II., p. 127, note.

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If we compare the development of serfage in Russia and in Western
Europe, we find very many points in common, but in Russia the movement
had certain peculiarities. One of the most important of these was caused by
the rapid development of the Autocratic Power. In feudal Europe, where
there was no strong central authority to control the Noblesse, the free rural
Communes entirely, or almost entirely, disappeared. They were either
appropriated by the nobles or voluntarily submitted to powerful landed
proprietors or to monasteries, and in this way the whole of the reclaimed
land, with a few rare exceptions, became the property of the nobles or of the
Church. In Russia we find the same movement, but it was arrested by the
Imperial power before all the land had been appropriated. The nobles could
reduce to serfage the peasants settled on their estates, but they could not
take possession of the free Communes, because such an appropriation
would have infringed the rights and diminished the revenues of the Tsar.
Down to the commencement of the last century, it is true, large grants of
land with serfs were made to favoured individuals among the Noblesse, and
in the reign of Paul (1796-1801) a considerable number of estates were
affected to the use of the Imperial family under the name of appanages
(Udyelniya imteniya); but on the other hand, the extensive Church lands,
when secularised by Catherine II., were not distributed among the nobles,
as in many other countries, but were transformed into State Domains. Thus,
at the date of the Emancipation (1861), by far the greater part of the
territory belonged to the State, and one-half of the rural population were so-
called State Peasants (Gosudarstvenniye krestyanye).
Regarding the condition of these State Peasants, or Peasants of the
Domains, as they are sometimes called, I may say briefly that they were, in
a certain sense, serfs, being attached to the soil like the others; but their
condition was, as a rule, somewhat better than the serfs in the narrower
acceptation of the term. They had to suffer much from the tyranny and
extortion of the special administration under which they lived, but they had
more land and more liberty than was commonly enjoyed on the estates of
resident proprietors, and their position was much less precarious. It is often
asserted that the officials of the Domains were worse than the serf-owners,
because they had not the same interest in the prosperity of the peasantry;
but this a priori reasoning does not stand the test of experience.
It is not a little interesting to observe the numerical proportion and
geographical distribution of these two rural classes. In European Russia, as

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a whole, about three-eighths of the population were composed of serfs
belonging to the nobles;* but if we take the provinces separately we find
great variations from this average. In five provinces the serfs were less than
three per cent., while in others they formed more than seventy per cent. of
the population! This is not an accidental phenomenon. In the geographical
distribution of serfage we can see reflected the origin and history of the
institution.

* The exact numbers, according to official data, were—Entire
Population 60,909,309
Peasantry of all Classes 49,486,665

Of these latter there were—State Peasants
23,138,191
Peasants on the Lands of Proprietors 23,022,390
Peasants of the Appanages and other Departments 3,326,084
—————
49,486,665

If we were to construct a map showing the geographical distribution of
the serf population, we should at once perceive that serfage radiated from
Moscow. Starting from that city as a centre and travelling in any direction
towards the confines of the Empire, we find that, after making allowance
for a few disturbing local influences, the proportion of serfs regularly
declines in the successive provinces traversed. In the region representing
the old Muscovite Tsardom they form considerably more than a half of the
rural population. Immediately to the south and east of this, in the territory
that was gradually annexed during the seventeenth and first half of the
eighteenth century, the proportion varies from twenty-five to fifty per cent.,
and in the more recently annexed provinces it steadily decreases till it
almost reaches zero.
We may perceive, too, that the percentage of serfs decreases towards the
north much more rapidly than towards the east and south. This points to the
essentially agricultural nature of serfage in its infancy. In the south and east
there was abundance of rich "black earth" celebrated for its fertility, and the
nobles in quest of estates naturally preferred this region to the inhospitable
north, with its poor soil and severe climate.
A more careful examination of the supposed map* would bring out other
interesting facts. Let me notice one by way of illustration. Had serfage been
the result of conquest we should have found the Slavonic race settled on the
State Domains, and the Finnish and Tartar tribes supplying the serfs of the

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nobles. In reality we find quite the reverse; the Finns and Tartars were
nearly all State Peasants, and the serfs of the proprietors were nearly all of
Slavonic race. This is to be accounted for by the fact that the Finnish and
Tartar tribes inhabit chiefly the outlying regions, in which serfage never
attained such dimensions as in the centre of the Empire.

* Such a map was actually constructed by Troinitski
("Krepostnoe Naseleniye v Rossii," St. Petersburg, 1861),
but it is not nearly so graphic as is might have been.

The dues paid by the serfs were of three kinds: labour, money, and farm
produce. The last-named is so unimportant that it may be dismissed in a few
words. It consisted chiefly of eggs, chickens, lambs, mushrooms, wild
berries, and linen cloth. The amount of these various products depended
entirely on the will of the master. The other two kinds of dues, as more
important, we must examine more closely.
When a proprietor had abundance of fertile land and wished to farm on
his own account, he commonly demanded from his serfs as much labour as
possible. Under such a master the serfs were probably free from money
dues, and fulfilled their obligations to him by labouring in his fields in
summer and transporting his grain to market in winter. When, on the
contrary, a land-owner had more serf labour at his disposal than he required
for the cultivation of his fields, he put the superfluous serfs "on obrok,"—
that is to say, he allowed them to go and work where they pleased on
condition of paying him a fixed yearly sum. Sometimes the proprietor did
not farm at all on his own account, in which case he put all the serfs "on
obrok," and generally gave to the Commune in usufruct the whole of the
arable land and pasturage. In this way the Mir played the part of a tenant.
We have here the basis for a simple and important classification of estates
in the time of serfage: (1) Estates on which the dues were exclusively in
labour; (2) estates on which the dues were partly in labour and partly in
money; and (3) estates on which the dues were exclusively in money.
In the manner of exacting the labour dues there was considerable variety.
According to the famous manifesto of Paul I., the peasant could not be
compelled to work more than three days in the week; but this law was by no
means universally observed, and those who did observe it had various
methods of applying it. A few took it literally and laid down a rule that the
serfs should work for them three definite days in the week—for example,

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every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday—but this was an extremely
inconvenient method, for it prevented the field labour from being carried on
regularly. A much more rational system was that according to which one-
half of the serfs worked the first three days of the week, and the other half
the remaining three. In this way there was, without any contravention of the
law, a regular and constant supply of labour. It seems, however, that the
great majority of the proprietors followed no strict method, and paid no
attention whatever to Paul's manifesto, which gave to the peasants no legal
means of making formal complaints. They simply summoned daily as many
labourers as they required. The evil consequences of this for the peasants'
crops were in part counteracted by making the peasants sow their own grain
a little later than that of the proprietor, so that the master's harvest work was
finished, or nearly finished, before their grain was ripe. This combination
did not, however, always succeed, and in cases where there was a conflict
of interests, the serf was, of course, the losing party. All that remained for
him to do in such cases was to work a little in his own fields before six
o'clock in the morning and after nine o'clock at night, and in order to render
this possible he economised his strength, and worked as little as possible in
his master's fields during the day.
It has frequently been remarked, and with much truth—though the
indiscriminate application of the principle has often led to unjustifiable
legislative inactivity—that the practical result of institutions depends less
on the intrinsic abstract nature of the institutions themselves than on the
character of those who work them. So it was with serfage. When a
proprietor habitually acted towards his serfs in an enlightened, rational,
humane way, they had little reason to complain of their position, and their
life was much easier than that of many men who live in a state of complete
individual freedom and unlimited, unrestricted competition. However
paradoxical the statement may seem to those who are in the habit of
regarding all forms of slavery from the sentimental point of view, it is
unquestionable that the condition of serfs under such a proprietor as I have
supposed was more enviable than that of the majority of English
agricultural labourers. Each family had a house of its own, with a cabbage-
garden, one or more horses, one or two cows, several sheep, poultry,
agricultural implements, a share of the Communal land, and everything else
necessary for carrying on its small farming operations; and in return for this
it had to supply the proprietor with an amount of labour which was by no

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means oppressive. If, for instance, a serf had three adult sons—and the
households, as I have said, were at that time generally numerous—two of
them might work for the proprietor whilst he himself and the remaining son
could attend exclusively to the family affairs. By the events which used to
be called "the visitations of God" he had no fear of being permanently
ruined. If his house was burnt, or his cattle died from the plague, or a series
of "bad years" left him without seed for his fields, he could always count
upon temporary assistance from his master. He was protected, too, against
all oppression and exactions on the part of the officials; for the police, when
there was any call for its interference, applied to the proprietor, who was to
a certain extent responsible for his serfs. Thus the serf might live a tranquil,
contented life, and die at a ripe old age, without ever having been conscious
that serfage was a grievous burden.
If all the serfs had lived in this way we might, perhaps, regret that the
Emancipation was ever undertaken. In reality there was, as the French say,
le revers de la medaille, and serfage generally appeared under a form very
different from that which I have just depicted. The proprietors were,
unfortunately, not all of the enlightened, humane type. Amongst them were
many who demanded from their serfs an inordinate amount of labour, and
treated them in a very inhuman fashion.
These oppressors of their serfs may be divided into four categories. First,
there were the proprietors who managed their own estates, and oppressed
simply for the purpose of increasing their revenues. Secondly, there were a
number of retired officers who wished to establish a certain order and
discipline on their estates, and who employed for this purpose the barbarous
measures which were at that time used in the army, believing that merciless
corporal punishment was the only means of curing laziness, disorderliness
and other vices. Thirdly, there were the absentees who lived beyond their
means, and demanded from their steward, under pain of giving him or his
son as a recruit, a much greater yearly sum than the estate could be
reasonably expected to yield. Lastly, in the latter years of serfage, there
were a number of men who bought estates as a mercantile speculation, and
made as much money out of them as they could in the shortest possible
space of time.
Of all hard masters, the last-named were the most terrible. Utterly
indifferent to the welfare of the serfs and the ultimate fate of the property,

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they cut down the timber, sold the cattle, exacted heavy money dues under
threats of giving the serfs or their children as recruits, presented to the
military authorities a number of conscripts greater than was required by law
—selling the conscription receipts (zatchetniya kvitantsii) to the merchants
and burghers who were liable to the conscription but did not wish to serve
—compelled some of the richer serfs to buy their liberty at an enormous
price, and, in a word, used every means, legal and illegal, for extracting
money. By this system of management they ruined the estate completely in
the course of a few years; but by that time they had realised probably the
whole sum paid, with a very fair profit from the operation; and this profit
could be considerably augmented by selling a number of the peasant
families for transportation to another estate (na svoz), or by mortgaging the
property in the Opekunski Sovet—a Government institution which lent
money on landed property without examining carefully the nature of the
security.
As to the means which the proprietors possessed of oppressing their
peasants, we must distinguish between the legal and the actual. The legal
were almost as complete as any one could desire. "The proprietor," it is said
in the Laws (Vol. IX, p. 1045, ed. an. 1857), "may impose on his serfs every
kind of labour, may take from them money dues (obrok) and demand from
them personal service, with this one restriction, that they should not be
thereby ruined, and that the number of days fixed by law should be left to
them for their own work."* Besides this, he had the right to transform
peasants into domestic servants, and might, instead of employing them in
his own service, hire them out to others who had the rights and privileges of
Noblesse (pp. 1047-48). For all offences committed against himself or
against any one under his jurisdiction he could subject the guilty ones to
corporal punishment not exceeding forty lashes with the birch or fifteen
blows with the stick (p. 1052); and if he considered any of his serfs as
incorrigible, he could present them to the authorities to be drafted into the
army or transported to Siberia as he might desire (pp. 1053-55). In cases of
insubordination, where the ordinary domestic means of discipline did not
suffice, he could call in the police and the military to support his authority.

* I give here the references to the Code, because Russians
commonly believe and assert that the hiring out of serfs,
the infliction of corporal punishment, and similar practices
were merely abuses unauthorised by law.

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Such were the legal means by which the proprietor might oppress his
peasants, and it will be readily understood that they were very considerable
and very elastic. By law he had the power to impose any dues in labour or
money which he might think fit, and in all cases the serfs were ordered to
be docile and obedient (p. 1027). Corporal punishment, though restricted by
law, he could in reality apply to any extent. Certainly none of the serfs, and
very few of the proprietors, were aware that the law placed any restriction
on this right. All the proprietors were in the habit of using corporal
punishment as they thought proper, and unless a proprietor became
notorious for inhuman cruelty the authorities never thought of interfering.
But in the eyes of the peasants corporal punishment was not the worst.
What they feared infinitely more than the birch or the stick was the
proprietor's power of giving them or their sons as recruits. The law assumed
that this extreme means would be employed only against those serfs who
showed themselves incorrigibly vicious or insubordinate; but the authorities
accepted those presented without making any investigations, and
consequently the proprietor might use this power as an effective means of
extortion.
Against these means of extortion and oppression the serfs had no legal
protection. The law provided them with no means of resisting any injustice
to which they might be subjected, or of bringing to punishment the master
who oppressed and ruined them. The Government, notwithstanding its
sincere desire to protect them from inordinate burdens and cruel treatment,
rarely interfered between the master and his serfs, being afraid of thereby
undermining the authority of the proprietors, and awakening among the
peasantry a spirit of insubordination. The serfs were left, therefore, to their
own resources, and had to defend themselves as best they could. The
simplest way was open mutiny; but this was rarely employed, for they knew
by experience that any attempt of the kind would be at once put down by
the military and mercilessly punished. Much more favourite and efficient
methods were passive resistance, flight, and fire-raising or murder.
We might naturally suppose that an unscrupulous proprietor, armed with
the enormous legal and actual power which I have just described, could
very easily extort from his peasants anything he desired. In reality, however,
the process of extortion, when it exceeded a certain measure, was a very
difficult operation. The Russian peasant has a capacity of patient endurance
that would do honour to a martyr, and a power of continued, dogged,

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passive resistance such as is possessed, I believe, by no other class of men
in Europe; and these qualities formed a very powerful barrier against the
rapacity of unconscientious proprietors. As soon as the serfs remarked in
their master a tendency to rapacity and extortion, they at once took
measures to defend themselves. Their first step was to sell secretly the live
stock they did not actually require, and all their movable property except
the few articles necessary for everyday use; then the little capital realised
was carefully hidden.
When this had been effected, the proprietor might threaten and punish as
he liked, but he rarely succeeded in unearthing the treasure. Many a
peasant, under such circumstances, bore patiently the most cruel
punishment, and saw his sons taken away as recruits, and yet he persisted in
declaring that he had no money to ransom himself and his children. A
spectator in such a case would probably have advised him to give up his
little store of money, and thereby liberate himself from persecution; but the
peasants reasoned otherwise. They were convinced, and not without reason,
that the sacrifice of their little capital would merely put off the evil day, and
that the persecution would very soon recommence. In this way they would
have to suffer as before, and have the additional mortification of feeling that
they had spent to no purpose the little that they possessed. Their fatalistic
belief in the "perhaps" (avos') came here to their aid. Perhaps the proprietor
might become weary of his efforts when he saw that they led to no result, or
perhaps something might occur which would remove the persecutor.
It always happened, however, that when a proprietor treated his serfs with
extreme injustice and cruelty, some of them lost patience, and sought refuge
in flight. As the estates lay perfectly open on all sides, and it was utterly
impossible to exercise a strict supervision, nothing was easier than to run
away, and the fugitive might be a hundred miles off before his absence was
noticed. But the oppressed serf was reluctant to adopt such an extreme
measure. He had almost always a wife and family, and he could not
possibly take them with him; flight, therefore, was expatriation for life in its
most terrible form. Besides this, the life of a fugitive was by no means
enviable. He was liable at any moment to fall into the hands of the police,
and to be put into prison or sent back to his master. So little charm, indeed,
did this life present that not infrequently after a few months or a few years
the fugitive returned of his own accord to his former domicile.

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Regarding fugitives or passportless wanderers in general, I may here
remark parenthetically that there were two kinds. In the first place, there
was the young, able-bodied peasant, who fled from the oppression of his
master or from the conscription. Such a fugitive almost always sought out
for himself a new domicile—generally in the southern provinces, where
there was a great scarcity of labourers, and where many proprietors
habitually welcomed all peasants who presented themselves, without
making any inquiries as to passports. In the second place, there were those
who chose fugitivism as a permanent mode of life. These were, for the most
part, men or women of a certain age—widowers or widows—who had no
close family ties, and who were too infirm or too lazy to work. The majority
of these assumed the character of pilgrims. As such they could always find
enough to eat, and could generally even collect a few roubles with which to
grease the palm of any zealous police-officer who should arrest them. For a
life of this kind Russia presented peculiar facilities. There was abundance of
monasteries, where all comers could live for three days without questions
being asked, and where those who were willing to do a little work for the
patron saint might live for a much longer period. Then there were the
towns, where the rich merchants considered almsgiving as very profitable
for salvation. And, lastly, there were the villages, where a professing
pilgrim was sure to be hospitably received and entertained so long as he
refrained from stealing and other acts too grossly inconsistent with his
assumed character. For those who contented themselves with simple fare,
and did not seek to avoid the usual privations of a wanderer's life, these
ordinary means of subsistence were amply sufficient. Those who were more
ambitious and more cunning often employed their talents with great success
in the world of the Old Ritualists and Sectarians.
The last and most desperate means of defense which the serfs possessed
were fire-raising and murder. With regard to the amount of fire-raising there
are no trustworthy statistics. With regard to the number of agrarian murders
I once obtained some interesting statistical data, but unfortunately lost
them. I may say, however, that these cases were not very numerous. This is
to be explained in part by the patient, long-suffering character of the
peasantry, and in part by the fact that the great majority of the proprietors
were by no means such inhuman taskmasters as is sometimes supposed.
When a case did occur, the Administration always made a strict
investigation—punishing the guilty with exemplary severity, and taking no

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account of the provocation to which they had been subjected. The
peasantry, on the contrary—at least, when the act was not the result of mere
personal vengeance—secretly sympathised with "the unfortunates," and
long cherished their memory as that of men who had suffered for the Mir.
In speaking of the serfs I have hitherto confined my attention to the
members of the Mir, or rural Commune—that is to say, the peasants in the
narrower sense of the term; but besides these there were the Dvorovuye, or
domestic servants, and of these I must add a word or two.
The Dvorovuye were domestic slaves rather than serfs in the proper sense
of the term. Let us, however, avoid wounding unnecessarily Russian
sensibilities by the use of the ill-sounding word. We may call the class in
question "domestics"—remembering, of course, that they were not quite
domestic servants in the ordinary sense. They received no wages, were not
at liberty to change masters, possessed almost no legal rights, and might be
punished, hired out, or sold by their owners without any infraction of the
written law.
These "domestics" were very numerous—out of all proportion to the
work to be performed—and could consequently lead a very lazy life;* but
the peasant considered it a great misfortune to be transferred to their ranks,
for he thereby lost his share of the Communal land and the little
independence which he enjoyed. It very rarely happened, however, that the
proprietor took an able-bodied peasant as domestic. The class generally
kept up its numbers by the legitimate and illegitimate method of natural
increase; and involuntary additions were occasionally made when orphans
were left without near relatives, and no other family wished to adopt them.
To this class belonged the lackeys, servant-girls, cooks, coachmen, stable-
boys, gardeners, and a large number of nondescript old men and women
who had no very clearly defined functions. If the proprietor had a private
theatre or orchestra, it was from this class that the actors and musicians
were drawn. Those of them who were married and had children occupied a
position intermediate between the ordinary domestic servant and the
peasant. On the one hand, they received from the master a monthly
allowance of food and a yearly allowance of clothes, and they were obliged
to live in the immediate vicinity of the mansion-house; but, on the other
hand, they had each a separate house or apartment, with a little cabbage-

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garden, and commonly a small plot of flax. The unmarried ones lived in all
respects like ordinary domestic servants.

* Those proprietors who kept orchestras, large packs of
hounds, &c., had sometimes several hundred domestic serfs.

The number of these domestic serfs being generally out of all proportion
to the amount of work they had to perform, they were imbued with a
hereditary spirit of indolence, and they performed lazily and carelessly what
they had to do. On the other hand, they were often sincerely attached to the
family they served, and occasionally proved by acts their fidelity and
attachment. Here is an instance out of many for which I can vouch. An old
nurse, whose mistress was dangerously ill, vowed that, in the event of the
patient's recovery, she would make a pilgrimage, first to Kief, the Holy City
on the Dnieper, and afterwards to Solovetsk, a much revered monastery on
an island in the White Sea. The patient recovered, and the old woman, in
fulfilment of her vow, walked more than two thousand miles!
This class of serfs might well be called domestic slaves, but I must warn
the reader that he ought not to use the expression when speaking with
Russians, because they are extremely sensitive on the point. Serfage, they
say, was something quite different from slavery, and slavery never existed
in Russia.
The first part of this assertion is perfectly true, and the second part
perfectly false. In old times, as I have said above, slavery was a recognised
institution in Russia as in other countries. One can hardly read a few pages
of the old chronicles without stumbling on references to slaves; and I
distinctly remember—though I cannot at this moment give chapter and
verse—that one of the old Russian Princes was so valiant and so successful
in his wars that during his reign a slave might be bought for a few coppers.
As late as the beginning of last century the domestic serfs were sold very
much as domestic slaves used to be sold in countries where slavery was
recognised as a legal institution. Here is an example of the customary
advertisement; I take it almost at random from the Moscow Gazette of
1801:—"TO BE SOLD: three coachmen, well trained and handsome; and
two girls, the one eighteen, and the other fifteen years of age, both of them
good-looking, and well acquainted with various kinds of handiwork. In the
same house there are for sale two hairdressers; the one, twenty-one years of
age, can read, write, play on a musical instrument, and act as huntsman; the

Page 473

other can dress ladies' and gentlemen's hair. In the same house are sold
pianos and organs."
A little farther on in the same number of the paper, a first-rate clerk, a
carver, and a lackey are offered for sale, and the reason assigned is a
superabundance of the articles in question (za izlishestvom). In some
instances it seems as if the serfs and the cattle were intentionally put in the
same category, as in the following announcement: "In this house one can
buy a coachman and a Dutch cow about to calve." The style of these
advertisements, and the frequent recurrence of the same addresses, show
that there was at this time in Moscow a regular class of slave-dealers. The
humane Alexander I. prohibited advertisements of this kind, but he did not
put down the custom which they represented, and his successor, Nicholas I.,
took no effective measures for its repression.
Of the whole number of serfs belonging to the proprietors, the domestics
formed, according to the census of 1857, no less than 6 3/4 per cent. (6.79),
and their numbers were evidently rapidly increasing, for in the preceding
census they represented only 4.79 per cent. of the whole. This fact seems all
the more significant when we observe that during this period the number of
peasant serfs had diminished.
I must now bring this long chapter to an end. My aim has been to
represent serfage in its normal, ordinary forms rather than in its occasional
monstrous manifestations. Of these latter I have a collection containing
ample materials for a whole series of sensation novels, but I refrain from
quoting them, because I do not believe that the criminal annals of a country
give a fair representation of its real condition. On the other hand, I do not
wish to whitewash serfage or attenuate its evil consequences. No great body
of men could long wield such enormous uncontrolled power without
abusing it,* and no large body of men could long live under such power
without suffering morally and materially from its pernicious influence. If
serfage did not create that moral apathy and intellectual lethargy which
formed, as it were, the atmosphere of Russian provincial life, it did much at
least to preserve it. In short, serfage was the chief barrier to all material and
moral progress, and in a time of moral awakening such as that which I have
described in the preceding chapter, the question of Emancipation naturally
came at once to the front.

* The number of deposed proprietors—or rather the number of

Page 474

estates placed under curators in consequence of the abuse of
authority on the part of their owners—amounted in 1859 to
215. So at least I found in an official MS. document shown
to me by the late Nicholas Milutin.

Page 475

CHAPTER XXIX
THE EMANCIPATION OF THE SERFS

The Question Raised—Chief Committee—The Nobles of the Lithuanian
Provinces—The Tsar's Broad Hint to the Noblesse—Enthusiasm in the
Press—The Proprietors—Political Aspirations—No Opposition—The
Government—Public Opinion—Fear of the Proletariat—The Provincial
Committees—The Elaboration Commission—The Question Ripens—
Provincial Deputies—Discontent and Demonstrations—The Manifesto—
Fundamental Principles of the Law—Illusions and Disappointment of the
Serfs—Arbiters of the Peace—A Characteristic Incident—Redemption—
Who Effected the Emancipation?
It is a fundamental principle of Russian political organisation that all
initiative in public affairs proceeds from the Autocratic Power. The
widespread desire, therefore, for the Emancipation of the serfs did not find
free expression so long as the Emperor kept silence regarding his intentions.
The educated classes watched anxiously for some sign, and soon a sign was
given to them. In March, 1856—a few days after the publication of the
manifesto announcing the conclusion of peace with the Western Powers—
his Majesty said to the Marshals of Noblesse in Moscow: "For the removal
of certain unfounded reports I consider it necessary to declare to you that I
have not at present the intention of annihilating serfage; but certainly, as
you yourselves know, the existing manner of possessing serfs cannot remain
unchanged. It is better to abolish serfage from above than to await the time
when it will begin to abolish itself from below. I request you, gentlemen, to
consider how this can be put into execution, and to submit my words to the
Noblesse for their consideration."
These words were intended to sound the Noblesse and induce them to
make a voluntary proposal, but they had not the desired effect. Abolitionist
enthusiasm was rare among the great nobles, and those who really wished
to see serfage abolished considered the Imperial utterance too vague and
oracular to justify them in taking the initiative. As no further steps were
taken for some time, the excitement caused by the incident soon subsided,

Page 476

and many people assumed that the consideration of the problem had been
indefinitely postponed. "The Government," it was said, "evidently intended
to raise the question, but on perceiving the indifference or hostility of the
landed proprietors, it became frightened and drew back."
The Emperor was in reality disappointed. He had expected that his
"faithful Moscow Noblesse," of which he was wont to say he was himself a
member, would at once respond to his call, and that the ancient capital
would have the honour of beginning the work. And if the example were
thus given by Moscow, he had no doubt that it would soon be followed by
the other provinces. He now perceived that the fundamental principles on
which the Emancipation should be effected must be laid down by the
Government, and for this purpose he created a secret committee composed
of several great officers of State.
This "Chief Committee for Peasant Affairs," as it was afterwards called,
devoted six months to studying the history of the question. Emancipation
schemes were by no means a new phenomenon in Russia. Ever since the
time of Catherine II. the Government had thought of improving the
condition of the serfs, and on more than one occasion a general
emancipation had been contemplated. In this way the question had slowly
ripened, and certain fundamental principles had come to be pretty generally
recognised. Of these principles the most important was that the State should
not consent to any project which would uproot the peasant from the soil and
allow him to wander about at will; for such a measure would render the
collection of the taxes impossible, and in all probability produce the most
frightful agrarian disorders. And to this general principle there was an
important corollary: if severe restrictions were to be placed on free
migration, it would be necessary to provide the peasantry with land in the
immediate vicinity of the villages; otherwise they must inevitably fall back
under the power of the proprietors, and a new and worse kind of serfage
would thus be created. But in order to give land to the peasantry it would be
necessary to take it from the proprietors; and this expropriation seemed to
many a most unjustifiable infringement of the sacred rights of property. It
was this consideration that had restrained Nicholas from taking any decisive
measures with regard to serfage; and it had now considerable weight with
the members of the committee, who were nearly all great land-owners.

Page 477

Notwithstanding the strenuous exertions of the Grand Duke Constantine,
who had been appointed a member for the express purpose of accelerating
the proceedings, the committee did not show as much zeal and energy as
was desired, and orders were given to take some decided step. At that
moment a convenient opportunity presented itself.
In the Lithuanian Provinces, where the nobles were Polish by origin and
sympathies, the miserable condition of the peasantry had induced the
Government in the preceding reign to limit the arbitrary power of the serf-
owners by so-called Inventories, in which the mutual obligations of masters
and serfs were regulated and defined. These Inventories had caused great
dissatisfaction, and the proprietors now proposed that they should be
revised. Of this the Government determined to take advantage. On the
somewhat violent assumption that these proprietors wished to emancipate
their serfs, an Imperial rescript was prepared approving of their supposed
desire, and empowering them to form committees for the preparation of
definite projects.* In the rescript itself the word emancipation was
studiously avoided, but there could be no doubt as to the implied meaning,
for it was expressly stated in the supplementary considerations that "the
abolition of serfage must be effected not suddenly, but gradually." Four
days later the Minister of the Interior, in accordance with a secret order
from the Emperor, sent a circular to the Governors and Marshals of
Noblesse all over Russia proper, informing them that the nobles of the
Lithuanian Provinces "had recognised the necessity of liberating the
peasants," and that "this noble intention" had afforded peculiar satisfaction
to his Majesty. A copy of the rescript and the fundamental principles to be
observed accompanied the circular, "in case the nobles of other provinces
should express a similar desire."

* This celebrated document is known as "The Rescript to
Nazimof." More than once in the course of conversation I did
all in my power, within the limits of politeness and
discretion, to extract from General Nazimof a detailed
account of this important episode, but my efforts were
unsuccessful.

This circular produced an immense sensation throughout the country. No
one could for a moment misunderstand the suggestion that the nobles of
other provinces MIGHT POSSIBLY express a desire to liberate their serfs.
Such vague words, when spoken by an autocrat, have a very definite and
unmistakable meaning, which prudent loyal subjects have no difficulty in

Page 478

understanding. If any doubted, their doubts were soon dispelled, for the
Emperor, a few weeks later, publicly expressed a hope that, with the help of
God and the co-operation of the nobles, the work would be successfully
accomplished.
The die was cast, and the Government looked anxiously to see the result.
The periodical Press—which was at once the product and the fomenter of
the liberal aspirations—hailed the raising of the question with boundless
enthusiasm. The Emancipation, it was said, would certainly open a new and
glorious epoch in the national history. Serfage was described as an ulcer
that had long been poisoning the national blood; as an enormous weight
under which the whole nation groaned; as an insurmountable obstacle,
preventing all material and moral progress; as a cumbrous load which
rendered all free, vigorous action impossible, and prevented Russia from
rising to the level of the Western nations. If Russia had succeeded in
stemming the flood of adverse fortune in spite of this millstone round her
neck, what might she not accomplish when free and untrammelled? All
sections of the literary world had arguments to offer in support of the
foregone conclusion. The moralists declared that all the prevailing vices
were the product of serfage, and that moral progress was impossible in an
atmosphere of slavery; the lawyers held that the arbitrary authority of the
proprietors over the peasants had no legal basis; the economists explained
that free labour was an indispensable condition of industrial and
commercial prosperity; the philosophical historians showed that the normal
historical development of the country demanded the immediate abolition of
this superannuated remnant of barbarism; and the writers of the sentimental,
gushing type poured forth endless effusions about brotherly love to the
weak and the oppressed. In a word, the Press was for the moment
unanimous, and displayed a feverish excitement which demanded a liberal
use of superlatives.
This enthusiastic tone accorded perfectly with the feelings of a large
section of the nobles. Nearly the whole of the Noblesse was more or less
affected by the newborn enthusiasm for everything just, humanitarian, and
liberal. The aspirations found, of course, their most ardent representatives
among the educated youth; but they were by no means confined to the
younger men, who had passed through the universities and had always
regarded serfage as a stain on the national honour. Many a Saul was found

Page 479

among the prophets. Many an old man, with grey hairs and grandchildren,
who had all his life placidly enjoyed the fruits of serf labour, was now heard
to speak of serfage as an antiquated institution which could not be
reconciled with modern humanitarian ideas; and not a few of all ages, who
had formerly never thought of reading books or newspapers, now perused
assiduously the periodical literature, and picked up the liberal and
humanitarian phrases with which it was filled.
This Abolitionist fervour was considerably augmented by certain political
aspirations which did not appear in the newspapers, but which were at that
time very generally entertained. In spite of the Press-censure a large section
of the educated classes had become acquainted with the political literature
of France and Germany, and had imbibed therefrom an unbounded
admiration for Constitutional government. A Constitution, it was thought,
would necessarily remove all political evils and create something like a
political Millennium. And it was not to be a Constitution of the ordinary
sort—the fruit of compromise between hostile political parties—but an
institution designed calmly according to the latest results of political
science, and so constructed that all classes would voluntarily contribute to
the general welfare. The necessary prelude to this happy era of political
liberty was, of course, the abolition of serfage. When the nobles had given
up their power over their serfs they would receive a Constitution as an
indemnification and reward.
There were, however, many nobles of the old school who remained
impervious to all these new feelings and ideas. On them the raising of the
Emancipation question had a very different effect. They had no source of
revenue but their estates, and they could not conceive the possibility of
working their estates without serf labour. If the peasant was indolent and
careless even under strict supervision, what would he become when no
longer under the authority of a master? If the profits from farming were
already small, what would they be when no one would work without
wages? And this was not the worst, for it was quite evident from the circular
that the land question was to be raised, and that a considerable portion of
each estate would be transferred, at least for a time, to the emancipated
peasants.
To the proprietors who looked at the question in this way the prospect of
Emancipation was certainly not at all agreeable, but we must not imagine

Page 480

that they felt as English land-owners would feel if threatened by a similar
danger. In England a hereditary estate has for the family a value far beyond
what it would bring in the market. It is regarded as one and indivisible, and
any dismemberment of it would be looked upon as a grave family
misfortune. In Russia, on the contrary, estates have nothing of this semi-
sacred character, and may be at any time dismembered without outraging
family feeling or traditional associations. Indeed, it is not uncommon that
when a proprietor dies, leaving only one estate and several children, the
property is broken up into fractions and divided among the heirs. Even the
prospect of pecuniary sacrifice did not alarm the Russians so much as it
would alarm Englishmen. Men who keep no accounts and take little thought
for the morrow are much less averse to making pecuniary sacrifices—
whether for a wise or a foolish purpose—than those who carefully arrange
their mode of life according to their income.
Still, after due allowance has been made for these peculiarities, it must be
admitted that the feeling of dissatisfaction and alarm was very widespread.
Even Russians do not like the prospect of losing a part of their land and
income. No protest, however, was entered, and no opposition was made.
Those who were hostile to the measure were ashamed to show themselves
selfish and unpatriotic. At the same time they knew very well that the
Emperor, if he wished, could effect the Emancipation in spite of them, and
that resistance on their part would draw down upon them the Imperial
displeasure, without affording any compensating advantage. They knew,
too, that there was a danger from below, so that any useless show of
opposition would be like playing with matches in a powder-magazine. The
serfs would soon hear that the Tsar desired to set them free, and they might,
if they suspected that the proprietors were trying to frustrate the Tsar's
benevolent intentions, use violent measures to get rid of the opposition. The
idea of agrarian massacres had already taken possession of many timid
minds. Besides this, all classes of the proprietors felt that if the work was to
be done, it should be done by the Noblesse and not by the bureaucracy. If it
were effected by the nobles the interests of the land-owners would be duly
considered, but if it were effected by the Administration without their
concurrence and co-operation their interests would be neglected, and there
would inevitably be an enormous amount of jobbery and corruption. In
accordance with this view, the Noblesse corporations of the various
provinces successively requested permission to form committees for the

Page 481

consideration of the question, and during the year 1858 a committee was
opened in almost every province in which serfage existed.
In this way the question was apparently handed over for solution to the
nobles, but in reality the Noblesse was called upon merely to advise, and
not to legislate. The Government had not only laid down the fundamental
principles of the scheme; it continually supervised the work of construction,
and it reserved to itself the right of modifying or rejecting the projects
proposed by the committees.
According to these fundamental principles the serfs should be
emancipated gradually, so that for some time they would remain attached to
the glebe and subject to the authority of the proprietors. During this
transition period they should redeem by money payments or labour their
houses and gardens, and enjoy in usufruct a certain quantity of land,
sufficient to enable them to support themselves and to fulfil their
obligations to the State as well as to the proprietor. In return for this land
they should pay a yearly rent in money, produce or labour over and above
the yearly sum paid for the redemption of their houses and gardens. As to
what should be done after the expiry of the transition period, the
Government seems to have had no clearly conceived intentions. Probably it
hoped that by that time the proprietors and their emancipated serfs would
have invented some convenient modus vivendi, and that nothing but a little
legislative regulation would be necessary. But radical legislation is like the
letting-out of water. These fundamental principles, adopted at first with a
view to mere immediate practical necessity, soon acquired a very different
significance. To understand this we must return to the periodical literature.
Until the serf question came to be discussed, the reform aspirations were
very vague, and consequently there was a remarkable unanimity among
their representatives. The great majority of the educated classes were
unanimously of opinion that Russia should at once adopt from the West all
those liberal principles and institutions the exclusion of which had
prevented the country from rising to the level of the Western nations. But
very soon symptoms of a schism became apparent. Whilst the literature in
general was still preaching the doctrine that Russia should adopt everything
that was "liberal," a few voices began to be heard warning the unwary that
much which bore the name of liberal was in reality already antiquated and
worthless—that Russia ought not to follow blindly in the footsteps of other

Page 482

nations, but ought rather to profit by their experience, and avoid the errors
into which they had fallen. The chief of these errors was, according to these
new teachers, the abnormal development of individualism—the adoption of
that principle of laissez faire which forms the basis of what may be called
the Orthodox School of Political Economists. Individualism and
unrestricted competition, it was said, have now reached in the West an
abnormal and monstrous development. Supported by the laissez faire
principle, they have led—and must always lead—to the oppression of the
weak, the tyranny of capital, the impoverishment of the masses for the
benefit of the few, and the formation of a hungry, dangerous Proletariat!
This has already been recognised by the most advanced thinkers of France
and Germany. If the older countries cannot at once cure those evils, that is
no reason for Russia to inoculate herself with them. She is still at the
commencement of her career, and it would be folly for her to wander
voluntarily for ages in the Desert, when a direct route to the Promised Land
has been already discovered.
In order to convey some idea of the influence which this teaching
exercised, I must here recall, at the risk of repeating myself, what I said in a
former chapter. The Russians, as I have there pointed out, have a peculiar
way of treating political and social questions. Having received their
political education from books, they naturally attribute to theoretical
considerations an importance which seems to us exaggerated. When any
important or trivial question arises, they at once launch into a sea of
philosophical principles, and pay less attention to the little objects close at
hand than to the big ones that appear on the distant horizon of the future.
And when they set to work at any political reform they begin ab ovo. As
they have no traditional prejudices to fetter them, and no traditional
principles to lead them, they naturally take for their guidance the latest
conclusions of political philosophy.
Bearing this in mind, let us see how it affected the Emancipation
question. The Proletariat—described as a dangerous monster which was
about to swallow up society in Western Europe, and which might at any
moment cross the frontier unless kept out by vigorous measures—took
possession of the popular imagination, and aroused the fears of the reading
public. To many it seemed that the best means of preventing the formation
of a Proletariat in Russia was the securing of land for the emancipated serfs
and the careful preservation of the rural Commune. "Now is the moment," it

Page 483

was said, "for deciding the important question whether Russia is to fall a
prey, like the Western nations, to this terrible evil, or whether she is to
protect herself for ever against it. In the decision of this question lies the
future destiny of the country. If the peasants be emancipated without land,
or if those Communal institutions which give to every man a share of the
soil and secure this inestimable boon for the generations still unborn be now
abolished, a Proletariat will be rapidly formed, and the peasantry will
become a disorganised mass of homeless wanderers like the English
agricultural labourers. If, on the contrary, a fair share of land be granted to
them, and if the Commune be made proprietor of the land ceded, the danger
of a Proletariat is for ever removed, and Russia will thereby set an example
to the civilised world! Never has a nation had such an opportunity of
making an enormous leap forward on the road of progress, and never again
will the opportunity occur. The Western nations have discovered their error
when it is too late—when the peasantry have been already deprived of their
land, and the labouring classes of the towns have already fallen a prey to the
insatiable cupidity of the capitalists. In vain their most eminent thinkers
warn and exhort. Ordinary remedies are no longer of any avail. But Russia
may avoid these dangers, if she but act wisely and prudently in this great
matter. The peasants are still in actual, if not legal, possession of the land,
and there is as yet no Proletariat in the towns. All that is necessary,
therefore, is to abolish the arbitrary authority of the proprietors without
expropriating the peasants, and without disturbing the existing Communal
institutions, which form the best barrier against pauperism."
These ideas were warmly espoused by many proprietors, and exercised a
very great influence on the deliberations of the Provincial Committees. In
these committees there were generally two groups. The majorities, whilst
making large concessions to the claims of justice and expediency,
endeavoured to defend, as far as possible, the interests of their class; the
minorities, though by no means indifferent to the interests of the class to
which they belonged, allowed the more abstract theoretical considerations
to be predominant. At first the majorities did all in their power to evade the
fundamental principles laid down by the Government as much too
favourable to the peasantry; but when they perceived that public opinion, as
represented by the Press, went much further than the Government, they
clung to these fundamental principles—which secured at least the fee
simple of the estate to the landlord—as their anchor of safety. Between the

Page 484

two parties arose naturally a strong spirit of hostility, and the Government,
which wished to have the support of the minorities, found it advisable that
both should present their projects for consideration.
As the Provincial Committees worked independently, there was
considerable diversity in the conclusions at which they arrived. The task of
codifying these conclusions, and elaborating out of them a general scheme
of Emancipation, was entrusted to a special Imperial Commission,
composed partly of officials and partly of landed proprietors named by the
Emperor.* Those who believed that the question had really been handed
over to the Noblesse assumed that this Commission would merely arrange
the materials presented by the Provincial Committees, and that the
Emancipation Law would thereafter be elaborated by a National Assembly
of deputies elected by the nobles. In reality the Commission, working in St.
Petersburg under the direct guidance and control of the Government,
fulfilled a very different and much more important function. Using the
combined projects merely as a storehouse from which it could draw the
proposals it desired, it formed a new project of its own, which ultimately
received, after undergoing modification in detail, the Imperial assent.
Instead of being a mere chancellerie, as many expected, it became in a
certain sense the author of the Emancipation Law.

* Known as the Redaktsionnaya Komissiya, or Elaboration
Commission. Strictly speaking, there were two, but they are
commonly spoken of as one.

There was, as we have seen, in nearly all the Provincial Committees a
majority and a minority, the former of which strove to defend the interests
of the proprietors, whilst the latter paid more attention to theoretical
considerations, and endeavoured to secure for the peasantry a large amount
of land and Communal self-government. In the Commission there were the
same two parties, but their relative strength was very different. Here the
men of theory, instead of forming a minority, were more numerous than
their opponents, and enjoyed the support of the Government, which
regulated the proceedings. In its instructions we see how much the question
had ripened under the influence of the theoretical considerations. There is
no longer any trace of the idea that the Emancipation should be gradual; on
the contrary, it is expressly declared that the immediate effect of the law
should be the complete abolition of the proprietor's authority. There is even

Page 485

evidence of a clear intention of preventing the proprietor as far as possible
from exercising any influence over his former serfs. The sharp distinction
between the land occupied by the village and the arable land to be ceded in
usufruct likewise disappears, and it is merely said that efforts should be
made to enable the peasants to become proprietors of the land they required.
The aim of the Government had thus become clear and well defined. The
task to be performed was to transform the serfs at once, and with the least
possible disturbance of the existing economic conditions, into a class of
small Communal proprietors—that is to say, a class of free peasants
possessing a house and garden and a share of the Communal land. To effect
this it was merely necessary to declare the serf personally free, to draw a
clear line of demarcation between the Communal land and the rest of the
estate, and to determine the price or rent which should be paid for this
Communal property, inclusive of the land on which the village was built.
The law was prepared in strict accordance with these principles. As to the
amount of land to be ceded, it was decided that the existing arrangements,
founded on experience, should, as a general rule, be preserved—in other
words, the land actually enjoyed by the peasants should be retained by
them; and in order to prevent extreme cases of injustice, a maximum and a
minimum were fixed for each district. In like manner, as to the dues, it was
decided that the existing arrangements should be taken as the basis of the
calculation, but that the sum should be modified according to the amount of
land ceded. At the same time facilities were to be given for the transforming
of the labour dues into yearly money payments, and for enabling the
peasants to redeem them, with the assistance of the Government, in the
form of credit.
This idea of redemption created, at first, a feeling of alarm among the
proprietors. It was bad enough to be obliged to cede a large part of the
estates in usufruct, but it seemed to be much worse to have to sell it.
Redemption appeared to be a species of wholesale confiscation. But very
soon it became evident that the redeeming of the land was profitable for
both parties. Cession in perpetual usufruct was felt to be in reality
tantamount to alienation of the land, whilst the immediate redemption
would enable the proprietors, who had generally little or no ready money to
pay their debts, to clear their estates from mortgages, and to make the
outlays necessary for the transition to free labour. The majority of the

Page 486

proprietors, therefore, said openly: "Let the Government give us a suitable
compensation in money for the land that is taken from us, so that we may
be at once freed from all further trouble and annoyance."
When it became known that the Commission was not merely arranging
and codifying the materials, but elaborating a law of its own and regularly
submitting its decisions for Imperial confirmation, a feeling of
dissatisfaction appeared all over the country. The nobles perceived that the
question was being taken out of their hands, and was being solved by a
small body composed of bureaucrats and nominees of the Government.
After having made a voluntary sacrifice of their rights, they were being
unceremoniously pushed aside. They had still, however, the means of
correcting this. The Emperor had publicly promised that before the project
should become law deputies from the Provincial Committees should be
summoned to St. Petersburg to make objections and propose amendments.
The Commission and the Government would have willingly dispensed
with all further advice from the nobles, but it was necessary to redeem the
Imperial promise. Deputies were therefore summoned to the capital, but
they were not allowed to form, as they hoped, a public assembly for the
discussion of the question. All their efforts to hold meetings were frustrated,
and they were required merely to answer in writing a list of printed
questions regarding matters of detail. The fundamental principles, they were
told, had already received the Imperial sanction, and were consequently
removed from discussion. Those who desired to discuss details were invited
individually to attend meetings of the Commission, where they found one
or two members ready to engage with them in a little dialectical fencing.
This, of course, did not give much satisfaction. Indeed, the ironical tone in
which the fencing was too often conducted served to increase the existing
irritation. It was only too evident that the Commission had triumphed, and
some of the members could justly boast that they had drowned the deputies
in ink and buried them under reams of paper.
Believing, or at least professing to believe, that the Emperor was being
deceived in this matter by the Administration, several groups of deputies
presented petitions to his Majesty containing a respectful protest against the
manner in which they had been treated. But by this act they simply laid
themselves open to "the most unkindest cut of all." Those who had signed
the petitions received a formal reprimand through the police.

Page 487

This treatment of the deputies, and, above all, this gratuitous insult,
produced among the nobles a storm of indignation. They felt that they had
been entrapped. The Government had artfully induced them to form
projects for the emancipation of their serfs, and now, after having been used
as a cat's-paw in the work of their own spoliation, they were being
unceremoniously pushed aside as no longer necessary. Those who had
indulged in the hope of gaining political rights felt the blow most keenly. A
first gentle and respectful attempt at remonstrance had been answered by a
dictatorial reprimand through the police! Instead of being called to take an
active part in home and foreign politics, they were being treated as naughty
schoolboys. In view of this insult all differences of opinion were for the
moment forgotten, and all parties resolved to join in a vigorous protest
against the insolence and arbitrary conduct of the bureaucracy.
A convenient opportunity of making this protest in a legal way was
offered by the triennial Provincial Assemblies of the Noblesse about to be
held in several provinces. So at least it was thought, but here again the
Noblesse was checkmated by the Administration.
Before the opening of the Assemblies a circular was issued excluding the
Emancipation question from their deliberations. Some Assemblies evaded
this order, and succeeded in making a little demonstration by submitting to
his Majesty that the time had arrived for other reforms, such as the
separation of the administrative and judicial powers, and the creation of
local self-government, public judicial procedure, and trial by jury.
All these reforms were voluntarily effected by the Emperor a few years
later, but the manner in which they were suggested seemed to savour of
insubordination, and was a flagrant infraction of the principle that all
initiative in public affairs should proceed from the central Government.
New measures of repression were accordingly used. Some Marshals of
Noblesse were reprimanded and others deposed. Of the conspicuous
leaders, two were exiled to distant provinces and others placed under the
supervision of the police. Worst of all, the whole agitation strengthened the
Commission by convincing the Emperor that the majority of the nobles
were hostile to his benevolent plans.*

* This was a misinterpretation of the facts. Very many of
those who joined in the protest sincerely sympathised with
the idea of Emancipation, and were ready to be even more
"liberal" than the Government.

Page 488

When the Commission had finished its labours, its proposals passed to
the two higher instances—the Committee for Peasant Affairs and the
Council of State—and in both of these the Emperor declared plainly that he
could allow no fundamental changes. From all the members he demanded a
complete forgetfulness of former differences and a conscientious execution
of his orders; "For you must remember," he significantly added, "that in
Russia laws are made by the Autocratic Power." From an historical review
of the question he drew the conclusion that "the Autocratic Power created
serfage, and the Autocratic Power ought to abolish it." On March 3d
(February 19th, old style), 1861, the law was signed, and by that act more
than twenty millions of serfs were liberated.* A Manifesto containing the
fundamental principles of the law was at once sent all over the country, and
an order was given that it should be read in all the churches.

* It is sometimes said that forty millions of serfs have
been emancipated. The statement is true, if we regard the
State peasants as serfs. They held, as I have already
explained, an intermediate position between serfage and
freedom. The peculiar administration under which they lived
was partly abolished by Imperial Orders of September 7th,
1859, and October 23d, 1861. In 1866 they were placed, as
regards administration, on a level with the emancipated
serfs of the proprietors. As a general rule, they received
rather more land and had to pay somewhat lighter dues than
the emancipated serfs in the narrower sense of the term.

The three fundamental principles laid down by the law were:—1. That
the serfs should at once receive the civil rights of the free rural classes, and
that the authority of the proprietor should be replaced by Communal self-
government.
2. That the rural Communes should as far as possible retain the land they
actually held, and should in return pay to the proprietor certain yearly dues
in money or labour.
3. That the Government should by means of credit assist the Communes
to redeem these dues, or, in other words, to purchase the lands ceded to
them in usufruct.
With regard to the domestic serfs, it was enacted that they should
continue to serve their masters during two years, and that thereafter they
should be completely free, but they should have no claim to a share of the
land.

Page 489

It might be reasonably supposed that the serfs received with boundless
gratitude and delight the Manifesto proclaiming these principles. Here at
last was the realisation of their long-cherished hopes. Liberty was accorded
to them; and not only liberty, but a goodly portion of the soil—about half of
all the arable land possessed by the proprietors.
In reality the Manifesto created among the peasantry a feeling of
disappointment rather than delight. To understand this strange fact we must
endeavour to place ourselves at the peasant's point of view.
In the first place it must be remarked that all vague, rhetorical phrases
about free labour, human dignity, national progress, and the like, which may
readily produce among educated men a certain amount of temporary
enthusiasm, fall on the ears of the Russian peasant like drops of rain on a
granite rock. The fashionable rhetoric of philosophical liberalism is as
incomprehensible to him as the flowery circumlocutionary style of an
Oriental scribe would be to a keen city merchant. The idea of liberty in the
abstract and the mention of rights which lie beyond the sphere of his
ordinary everyday life awaken no enthusiasm in his breast. And for mere
names he has a profound indifference. What matters it to him that he is
officially called, not a "serf," but a "free village-inhabitant," if the change in
official terminology is not accompanied by some immediate material
advantage? What he wants is a house to live in, food to eat, and raiment
wherewithal to be clothed, and to gain these first necessaries of life with as
little labour as possible. He looked at the question exclusively from two
points of view—that of historical right and that of material advantage; and
from both of these the Emancipation Law seemed to him very
unsatisfactory.
On the subject of historical right the peasantry had their own traditional
conceptions, which were completely at variance with the written law.
According to the positive legislation the Communal land formed part of the
estate, and consequently belonged to the proprietor; but according to the
conceptions of the peasantry it belonged to the Commune, and the right of
the proprietor consisted merely in that personal authority over the serfs
which had been conferred on him by the Tsar. The peasants could not, of
course, put these conceptions into a strict legal form, but they often
expressed them in their own homely laconic way by saying to their master,
"Mui vashi no zemlya nasha"—that is to say. "We are yours, but the land is

Page 490

ours." And it must be admitted that this view, though legally untenable, had
a certain historical justification.*

* See preceding chapter.

In olden times the Noblesse had held their land by feudal tenure, and
were liable to be ejected as soon as they did not fulfil their obligations to
the State. These obligations had been long since abolished, and the feudal
tenure transformed into an unconditional right of property, but the peasants
clung to the old ideas in a way that strikingly illustrates the vitality of deep-
rooted popular conceptions. In their minds the proprietors were merely
temporary occupants, who were allowed by the Tsar to exact labour and
dues from the serfs. What, then, was Emancipation? Certainly the abolition
of all obligatory labour and money dues, and perhaps the complete
ejectment of the proprietors. On this latter point there was a difference of
opinion. All assumed, as a matter of course, that the Communal land would
remain the property of the Commune, but it was not so clear what would be
done with the rest of the estate. Some thought that it would be retained by
the proprietor, but very many believed that all the land would be given to
the Communes. In this way the Emancipation would be in accordance with
historical right and with the material advantage of the peasantry, for whose
exclusive benefit, it was assumed, the reform had been undertaken.
Instead of this the peasants found that they were still to pay dues, even
for the Communal land which they regarded as unquestionably their own.
So at least said the expounders of the law. But the thing was incredible.
Either the proprietors must be concealing or misinterpreting the law, or this
was merely a preparatory measure, which would be followed by the real
Emancipation. Thus were awakened among the peasantry a spirit of
mistrust and suspicion and a widespread belief that there would be a second
Imperial Manifesto, by which all the land would be divided and all the dues
abolished.
On the nobles the Manifesto made a very different impression. The fact
that they were to be entrusted with the putting of the law into execution, and
the flattering allusions made to the spirit of generous self-sacrifice which
they had exhibited, kindled amongst them enthusiasm enough to make them
forget for a time their just grievances and their hostility towards the
bureaucracy. They found that the conditions on which the Emancipation

Page 491

was effected were by no means so ruinous as they had anticipated; and the
Emperor's appeal to their generosity and patriotism made many of them
throw themselves with ardour into the important task confided to them.
Unfortunately they could not at once begin the work. The law had been
so hurried through the last stages that the preparations for putting it into
execution were by no means complete when the Manifesto was published.
The task of regulating the future relations between the proprietors and the
peasantry was entrusted to local proprietors in each district, who were to be
called Arbiters of the Peace (Mirovuiye Posredniki); but three months
elapsed before these Arbiters could be appointed. During that time there
was no one to explain the law to the peasants and settle the disputes
between them and the proprietors; and the consequence of this was that
many cases of insubordination and disorder occurred. The muzhik naturally
imagined that, as soon as the Tsar said he was free, he was no longer
obliged to work for his old master—that all obligatory labour ceased as
soon as the Manifesto was read. In vain the proprietor endeavoured to
convince him that, in regard to labour, the old relations must continue, as
the law enjoined, until a new arrangement had been made. To all
explanations and exhortations he turned a deaf ear, and to the efforts of the
rural police he too often opposed a dogged, passive resistance.
In many cases the simple appearance of the higher authorities sufficed to
restore order, for the presence of one of the Tsar's servants convinced many
that the order to work for the present as formerly was not a mere invention
of the proprietors. But not infrequently the birch had to be applied. Indeed, I
am inclined to believe, from the numerous descriptions of this time which I
received from eye-witnesses, that rarely, if ever, had the serfs seen and
experienced so much flogging as during these first three months after their
liberation. Sometimes even the troops had to be called out, and on three
occasions they fired on the peasants with ball cartridge. In the most serious
case, where a young peasant had set up for a prophet and declared that the
Emancipation Law was a forgery, fifty-one peasants were killed and
seventy-seven were more or less seriously wounded. In spite of these
lamentable incidents, there was nothing which even the most violent
alarmist could dignify with the name of an insurrection. Nowhere was there
anything that could be called organised resistance. Even in the case above
alluded to, the three thousand peasants on whom the troops fired were
entirely unarmed, made no attempt to resist, and dispersed in the utmost

Page 492

haste as soon as they discovered that they were being shot down. Had the
military authorities shown a little more judgment, tact, and patience, the
history of the Emancipation would not have been stained even with those
three solitary cases of unnecessary bloodshed.
This interregnum between the eras of serfage and liberty was brought to
an end by the appointment of the Arbiters of the Peace. Their first duty was
to explain the law, and to organise the new peasant self-government. The
lowest instance, or primary organ of this self-government, the rural
Commune, already existed, and at once recovered much of its ancient
vitality as soon as the authority and interference of the proprietors were
removed. The second instance, the Volost—a territorial administrative unit
comprising several contiguous Communes—had to be created, for nothing
of the kind had previously existed on the estates of the nobles. It had
existed, however, for nearly a quarter of a century among the peasants of
the Domains, and it was therefore necessary merely to copy an existing
model.
As soon as all the Volosts in his district had been thus organised the
Arbiter had to undertake the much more arduous task of regulating the
agrarian relations between the proprietors and the Communes—with the
individual peasants, be it remembered, the proprietors had no direct
relations whatever. It had been enacted by the law that the future agrarian
relations between the two parties should be left, as far as possible, to
voluntary contract; and accordingly each proprietor was invited to come to
an agreement with the Commune or Communes on his estate. On the
ground of this agreement a statute-charter (ustavnaya gramota) was
prepared, specifying the number of male serfs, the quantity of land actually
enjoyed by them, any proposed changes in this amount, the dues proposed
to be levied, and other details. If the Arbiter found that the conditions were
in accordance with the law and clearly understood by the peasants, he
confirmed the charter, and the arrangement was complete. When the two
parties could not come to an agreement within a year, he prepared a charter
according to his own judgment, and presented it for confirmation to the
higher authorities.
The dissolution of partnership, if it be allowable to use such a term,
between the proprietor and his serfs was sometimes very easy and
sometimes very difficult. On many estates the charter did little more than

Page 493

legalise the existing arrangements, but in many instances it was necessary
to add to, or subtract from, the amount of Communal land, and sometimes it
was even necessary to remove the village to another part of the estate. In all
cases there were, of course, conflicting interests and complicated questions,
so that the Arbiter had always abundance of difficult work. Besides this, he
had to act as mediator in those differences which naturally arose during the
transition period, when the authority of the proprietor had been abolished
but the separation of the two classes had not yet been effected. The
unlimited patriarchal authority which had been formerly wielded by the
proprietor or his steward now passed with certain restriction into the hands
of the Arbiter, and these peacemakers had to spend a great part of their time
in driving about from one estate to another to put an end to alleged cases of
insubordination—some of which, it must be admitted, existed only in the
imagination of the proprietors.
At first the work of amicable settlement proceeded slowly. The
proprietors generally showed a conciliatory spirit, and some of them
generously proposed conditions much more favourable to the peasants than
the law demanded; but the peasants were filled with vague suspicions, and
feared to commit themselves by "putting pen to paper." Even the highly
respected proprietors, who imagined that they possessed the unbounded
confidence of the peasantry, were suspected like the others, and their
generous offers were regarded as well-baited traps. Often I have heard old
men, sometimes with tears in their eyes, describe the distrust and
ingratitude of the muzhik at this time. Many peasants still believed that the
proprietors were hiding the real Emancipation Law, and imaginative or ill-
intentioned persons fostered this belief by professing to know what the real
law contained. The most absurd rumours were afloat, and whole villages
sometimes acted upon them.
In the province of Moscow, for instance, one Commune sent a deputation
to the proprietor to inform him that, as he had always been a good master,
the Mir would allow him to retain his house and garden during his lifetime.
In another locality it was rumoured that the Tsar sat daily on a golden
throne in the Crimea, receiving all peasants who came to him, and giving
them as much land as they desired; and in order to take advantage of the
Imperial liberality a large body of peasants set out for the place indicated,
and had to be stopped by the military.

Page 494

As an illustration of the illusions in which the peasantry indulged at this
time, I may mention here one of the many characteristic incidents related to
me by gentlemen who had served as Arbiters of the Peace.
In the province of Riazan there was one Commune which had acquired a
certain local notoriety for the obstinacy with which it refused all
arrangements with the proprietor. My informant, who was Arbiter for the
locality, was at last obliged to make a statute-charter for it without its
consent. He wished, however, that the peasants should voluntarily accept
the arrangement he proposed, and accordingly called them together to talk
with them on the subject. After explaining fully the part of the law which
related to their case, he asked them what objection they had to make a fair
contract with their old master. For some time he received no answer, but
gradually by questioning individuals he discovered the cause of their
obstinacy: they were firmly convinced that not only the Communal land,
but also the rest of the estate, belonged to them. To eradicate this false idea
he set himself to reason with them, and the following characteristic
dialogue ensued:—Arbiter: "If the Tsar gave all the land to the peasantry,
what compensation could he give to the proprietors to whom the land
belongs?"
Peasant: "The Tsar will give them salaries according to their service."
Arbiter: "In order to pay these salaries he would require a great deal more
money. Where could he get that money? He would have to increase the
taxes, and in that way you would have to pay all the same."
Peasant: "The Tsar can make as much money as he likes."
Arbiter: "If the Tsar can make as much money as he likes, why does he
make you pay the poll-tax every year?"
Peasant: "It is not the Tsar that receives the taxes we pay."
Arbiter: "Who, then, receives them?"
Peasant (after a little hesitation, and with a knowing smite): "The
officials, of course!"
Gradually, through the efforts of the Arbiters, the peasants came to know
better their real position, and the work began to advance more rapidly. But
soon it was checked by another influence. By the end of the first year the
"liberal," patriotic enthusiasm of the nobles had cooled. The sentimental,
idyllic tendencies had melted away at the first touch of reality, and those

Page 495

who had imagined that liberty would have an immediately salutary effect on
the moral character of the serfs confessed themselves disappointed. Many
complained that the peasants showed themselves greedy and obstinate, stole
wood from the forest, allowed their cattle to wander on the proprietor's
fields, failed to fulfil their legal obligations, and broke their voluntary
engagements. At the same time the fears of an agrarian rising subsided, so
that even the timid were tranquillised. From these causes the conciliatory
spirit of the proprietors decreased.
The work of conciliating and regulating became consequently more
difficult, but the great majority of the Arbiters showed themselves equal to
the task, and displayed an impartiality, tact and patience beyond all praise.
To them Russia is in great part indebted for the peaceful character of the
Emancipation. Had they sacrificed the general good to the interests of their
class, or had they habitually acted in that stern, administrative, military
spirit which caused the instances of bloodshed above referred to, the
prophecies of the alarmists would, in all probability, have been realised, and
the historian of the Emancipation would have had a terrible list of judicial
massacres to record. Fortunately they played the part of mediators, as their
name signified, rather than that of administrators in the bureaucratic sense
of the term, and they were animated with a just and humane rather than a
merely legal spirit. Instead of simply laying down the law, and ordering
their decisions to be immediately executed, they were ever ready to spend
hours in trying to conquer, by patient and laborious reasoning, the unjust
claims of proprietors or the false conceptions and ignorant obstinacy of the
peasants. It was a new spectacle for Russia to see a public function fulfilled
by conscientious men who had their heart in their work, who sought neither
promotion nor decorations, and who paid less attention to the punctilious
observance of prescribed formalities than to the real objects in view.
There were, it is true, a few men to whom this description does not apply.
Some of these were unduly under the influence of the feelings and
conceptions created by serfage. Some, on the contrary, erred on the other
side. Desirous of securing the future welfare of the peasantry and of gaining
for themselves a certain kind of popularity, and at the same time animated
with a violent spirit of pseudo-liberalism, these latter occasionally forgot
that their duty was to be, not generous, but just, and that they had no right to
practise generosity at other people's expense. All this I am quite aware of—I
could even name one or two Arbiters who were guilty of positive

Page 496

dishonesty—but I hold that these were rare exceptions. The great majority
did their duty faithfully and well.
The work of concluding contracts for the redemption of the dues, or, in
other words, for the purchase of the land ceded in perpetual usufruct,
proceeded slowly. The arrangement was as follows:—The dues were
capitalised at six per cent., and the Government paid at once to the
proprietors four-fifths of the whole sum. The peasants were to pay to the
proprietor the remaining fifth, either at once or in installments, and to the
Government six per cent. for forty-nine years on the sum advanced. The
proprietors willingly adopted this arrangement, for it provided them with a
sum of ready money, and freed them from the difficult task of collecting the
dues. But the peasants did not show much desire to undertake the operation.
Some of them still expected a second Emancipation, and those who did not
take this possibility into their calculations were little disposed to make
present sacrifices for distant prospective advantages which would not be
realised for half a century. In most cases the proprietor was obliged to remit,
in whole or in part, the fifth to be paid by the peasants. Many Communes
refused to undertake the operation on any conditions and in consequence of
this not a few proprietors demanded the so-called obligatory redemption,
according to which they accepted the four-fifths from the Government as
full payment, and the operation was thus effected without the peasants
being consulted. The total number of male serfs emancipated was about
nine millions and three-quarters,* and of these, only about seven millions
and a quarter had, at the beginning of 1875, made redemption contracts. Of
the contracts signed at that time, about sixty-three per cent, were
"obligatory." In 1887 the redemption was made obligatory for both parties,
so that all Communes are now proprietors of the land previously held in
perpetual usufruct; and in 1932 the debt will have been extinguished by the
sinking fund, and all redemption payments will have ceased.

* This does not include the domestic serfs who did not
receive land.

The serfs were thus not only liberated, but also made possessors of land
and put on the road to becoming Communal proprietors, and the old
Communal institutions were preserved and developed. In answer to the
question, Who effected this gigantic reform? we may say that the chief
merit undoubtedly belongs to Alexander II. Had he not possessed a very

Page 497

great amount of courage he would neither have raised the question nor
allowed it to be raised by others, and had he not shown a great deal more
decision and energy than was expected, the solution would have been
indefinitely postponed. Among the members of his own family he found an
able and energetic assistant in his brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, and
a warm sympathiser with the cause in the Grand Duchess Helena, a German
Princess thoroughly devoted to the welfare of her adopted country. But we
must not overlook the important part played by the nobles. Their conduct
was very characteristic. As soon as the question was raised a large number
of them adopted the liberal ideas with enthusiasm; and as soon as it became
evident that Emancipation was inevitable, all made a holocaust of their
ancient rights and demanded to be liberated at once from all relations with
their serfs. Moreover, when the law was passed it was the proprietors who
faithfully put it into execution. Lastly, we should remember that praise is
due to the peasantry for their patience under disappointment and for their
orderly conduct as soon as they understood the law and recognised it to be
the will of the Tsar. Thus it may justly be said that the Emancipation was
not the work of one man, or one party, or one class, but of the nation as a
whole.*

* The names most commonly associated with the Emancipation
are General Rostoftsef, Lanskoi (Minister of the Interior),
Nicholas Milutin, Prince Tchererkassky, G. Samarin,
Koshelef. Many others, such as I. A. Solovief, Zhukofski,
Domontovitch, Giers—brother of M. Giers, afterwards
Minister for Foreign Affairs—are less known, but did
valuable work. To all of these, with the exception of the
first two, who died before my arrival in Russia, I have to
confess my obligations. The late Nicholas Milutin rendered
me special service by putting at my disposal not only all
the official papers in his possession, but also many
documents of a more private kind. By his early and lamented
death Russia lost one of the greatest statesmen she has yet
produced.

Page 498

CHAPTER XXX
THE LANDED PROPRIETORS SINCE THE
EMANCIPATION

Two Opposite Opinions—Difficulties of Investigation—The Problem
Simplified—Direct and Indirect Compensation—The Direct Compensation
Inadequate—What the Proprietors Have Done with the Remainder of Their
Estates—Immediate Moral Effect of the Abolition of Serfage—The
Economic Problem—The Ideal Solution and the Difficulty of Realising It—
More Primitive Arrangements—The Northern Agricultural Zone—The
Black-earth Zone—The Labour Difficulty—The Impoverishment of the
Noblesse Not a New Phenomenon—Mortgaging of Estates—Gradual
Expropriation of the Noblesse-Rapid Increase in the Production and Export
of Grain—How Far this Has Benefited the Landed Proprietors.
When the Emancipation question was raised there was a considerable
diversity of opinion as to the effect which the abolition of serfage would
have on the material interests of the two classes directly concerned. The
Press and "the young generation" took an optimistic view, and endeavoured
to prove that the proposed change would be beneficial alike to proprietors
and to peasants. Science, it was said, has long since decided that free labour
is immensely more productive than slavery or serfage, and the principle has
been already proved to demonstration in the countries of Western Europe.
In all those countries modern agricultural progress began with the
emancipation of the serfs, and increased productivity was everywhere the
immediate result of improvements in the method of culture. Thus the poor
light soils of Germany, France, and Holland have been made to produce
more than the vaunted "black earth" of Russia. And from these
ameliorations the land-owning class has everywhere derived the chief
advantages. Are not the landed proprietors of England—the country in
which serfage was first abolished—the richest in the world? And is not the
proprietor of a few hundred morgen in Germany often richer than the
Russian noble who has thousands of dessyatins? By these and similar
plausible arguments the Press endeavoured to prove to the proprietors that

Page 499

they ought, even in their own interest, to undertake the emancipation of the
serfs. Many proprietors, however, showed little faith in the abstract
principles of political economy and the vague teachings of history as
interpreted by the contemporary periodical literature. They could not always
refute the ingenious arguments adduced by the men of more sanguine
temperament, but they felt convinced that their prospects were not nearly so
bright as these men represented them to be. They believed that Russia was a
peculiar country, and the Russians a peculiar people. The lower classes in
England, France, Holland, and Germany were well known to be laborious
and enterprising, while the Russian peasant was notoriously lazy, and would
certainly, if left to himself, not do more work than was absolutely necessary
to keep him from starving. Free labour might be more profitable than
serfage in countries where the upper classes possessed traditional practical
knowledge and abundance of capital, but in Russia the proprietors had
neither the practical knowledge nor the ready money necessary to make the
proposed ameliorations in the system of agriculture. To all this it was added
that a system of emancipation by which the peasants should receive land
and be made completely independent of the landed proprietors had nowhere
been tried on such a large scale.
There were thus two diametrically opposite opinions regarding the
economic results of the abolition of serfage, and we have now to examine
which of these two opinions has been confirmed by experience.
Let us look at the question first from the point of view of the land-
owners.
The reader who has never attempted to make investigations of this kind
may naturally imagine that the question can be easily decided by simply
consulting a large number of individual proprietors, and drawing a general
conclusion from their evidence. In reality I found the task much more
difficult. After roaming about the country for five years (1870-75),
collecting information from the best available sources, I hesitated to draw
any sweeping conclusions, and my state of mind at that time was naturally
reflected in the early editions of this work. As a rule the proprietors could
not state clearly how much they had lost or gained, and when definite
information was obtained from them it was not always trustworthy. In the
time of serfage very few of them had been in the habit of keeping accurate
accounts, or accounts of any kind, and when they lived on their estates there

Page 500

were a very large number of items which could not possibly be reduced to
figures. Of course, each proprietor had a general idea as to whether his
position was better or worse than it had been in the old times, but the vague
statements made by individuals regarding their former and their actual
revenues had little or no scientific value. So many considerations which had
nothing to do with purely agrarian relations entered into the calculations
that the conclusions did not help me much to estimate the economic results
of the Emancipation as a whole. Nor, it must be confessed, was the
testimony by any means always unbiassed. Not a few spoke of the great
reform in an epic or dithyrambic tone, and among these I easily
distinguished two categories: the one desired to prove that the measure was
a complete success in every way, and that all classes were benefited by it,
not only morally, but also materially; whilst the others strove to represent
the proprietors in general, and themselves in particular, as the self-
sacrificing victims of a great and necessary patriotic reform—as martyrs in
the cause of liberty and progress. I do not for a moment suppose that these
two groups of witnesses had a clearly conceived intention of deceiving or
misleading, but as a cautious investigator I had to make allowance for their
idealising and sentimental tendencies.
Since that time the situation has become much clearer, and during recent
visits to Russia I have been able to arrive at much more definite
conclusions. These I now proceed to communicate to the reader.
The Emancipation caused the proprietors of all classes to pass through a
severe economic crisis. Periods of transition always involve much suffering,
and the amount of suffering is generally in the inverse ratio of the
precautions taken beforehand. In Russia the precautions had been neglected.
Not one proprietor in a hundred had made any serious preparations for the
inevitable change. On the eve of the Emancipation there were about ten
millions of male serfs on private properties, and of these nearly seven
millions remained under the old system of paying their dues in labour. Of
course, everybody knew that Emancipation must come sooner or later, but
fore-thought, prudence, and readiness to take time by the forelock are not
among the prominent traits of the Russian character. Hence most of the
land-owners were taken unawares. But while all suffered, there were
differences of degree. Some were completely shipwrecked. So long as
serfage existed all the relations of life were ill-defined and extremely
elastic, so that a man who was hopelessly insolvent might contrive, with

Page 501

very little effort, to keep his head above water for half a lifetime. For such
men the Emancipation, like a crisis in the commercial world, brought a day
of reckoning. It did not really ruin them, but it showed them and the world
at large that they were ruined, and they could no longer continue their old
mode of life. For others the crisis was merely temporary. These emerged
with a larger income than they ever had before, but I am not prepared to say
that their material condition has improved, because the social habits have
changed, the cost of living has become much greater, and the work of
administering estates is incomparably more complicated and laborious than
in the old patriarchal times.
We may greatly simplify the problem by reducing it to two definite
questions:
1. How far were the proprietors directly indemnified for the loss of serf
labour and for the transfer in perpetual usufruct of a large part of their
estates to the peasantry?
2. What have the proprietors done with the remainder of their estates, and
how far have they been indirectly indemnified by the economic changes
which have taken place since the Emancipation?
With the first of these questions I shall deal very briefly, because it is a
controversial subject involving very complicated calculations which only a
specialist can understand. The conclusion at which I have arrived, after
much patient research, is that in most provinces the compensation was
inadequate, and this conclusion is confirmed by excellent native authorities.
M. Bekhteyev, for example, one of the most laborious and conscientious
investigators in this field of research, and the author of an admirable work
on the economic results of the Emancipation,* told me recently, in course of
conversation, that in his opinion the peasant dues fixed by the Emancipation
Law represented, throughout the Black-earth Zone, only about a half of the
value of the labour previously supplied by the serfs. To this I must add that
the compensation was in reality not nearly so great as it seemed to be
according to the terms of the law. As the proprietors found it extremely
difficult to collect the dues from the emancipated serfs, and as they required
a certain amount of capital to reorganise the estate on the new basis of free
labour, most of them were practically compelled to demand the obligatory
redemption of the land (obiazatelny vuikup), and in adopting this expedient
they had to make considerable sacrifices. Not only had they to accept as full

Page 502

payment four-fifths of the normal sum, but of this amount the greater
portion was paid in Treasury bonds, which fell at once to 80 per cent. of
their nominal value.

* "Khozaistvenniye Itogi istekshago Sorokoletiya." St.
Petersburg, 1902.

Let us now pass to the second part of the problem: What have the
proprietors done with the part of their estates which remained to them after
ceding the required amount of land to the Communes? Have they been
indirectly indemnified for the loss of serf labour by subsequent economic
changes? How far have they succeeded in making the transition from
serfage to free labour, and what revenues do they now derive from their
estates? The answer to these questions will necessarily contain some
account of the present economic position of the proprietors.
On all proprietors the Emancipation had at least one good effect: it
dragged them forcibly from the old path of indolence and routine and
compelled them to think and calculate regarding their affairs. The hereditary
listlessness and apathy, the traditional habit of looking on the estate with its
serfs as a kind of self-acting machine which must always spontaneously
supply the owner with the means of living, the inveterate practice of
spending all ready money and of taking little heed for the morrow—all this,
with much that resulted from it, was rudely swept away and became a thing
of the past.
The broad, easy road on which the proprietors had hitherto let themselves
be borne along by the force of circumstances suddenly split up into a
number of narrow, arduous, thorny paths. Each one had to use his
judgement to determine which of the paths he should adopt, and, having
made his choice, he had to struggle along as he best could. I remember once
asking a proprietor what effect the Emancipation had had on the class to
which he belonged, and he gave me an answer which is worth recording.
"Formerly," he said, "we kept no accounts and drank champagne; now we
keep accounts and content ourselves with kvass." Like all epigrammatic
sayings, this laconic reply is far from giving a complete description of
reality, but it indicates in a graphic way a change that has unquestionably
taken place. As soon as serfage was abolished it was no longer possible to
live like "the flowers of the field." Many a proprietor who had formerly
vegetated in apathetic ease had to ask himself the question: How am I to

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gain a living? All had to consider what was the most profitable way of
employing the land that remained to them.
The ideal solution of the problem was that as soon as the peasant-land
had been demarcated, the proprietor should take to farming the remainder
of his estate by means of hired labour and agricultural machines in West
European or American fashion. Unfortunately, this solution could not be
generally adopted, because the great majority of the landlords, even when
they had the requisite practical knowledge of agriculture, had not the
requisite capital, and could not easily obtain it. Where were they to find
money for buying cattle, horses, and agricultural implements, for building
stables and cattle-sheds, and for defraying all the other initial expenses?
And supposing they succeeded in starting the new system, where was the
working capital to come from? The old Government institution in which
estates could be mortgaged according to the number of serfs was
permanently closed, and the new land-credit associations had not yet come
into existence. To borrow from private capitalists was not to be thought of,
for money was so scarce than ten per cent. was considered a "friendly" rate
of interest. Recourse might be had, it is true, to the redemption operation,
but in that case the Government would deduct the unpaid portion of any
outstanding mortgage, and would pay the balance in depreciated Treasury
bonds. In these circumstances the proprietors could not, as a rule, adopt
what I have called the ideal solution, and had to content themselves with
some simpler and more primitive arrangement. They could employ the
peasants of the neighbouring villages to prepare the land and reap the crops
either for a fixed sum per acre or on the metayage system, or they could let
their land to the peasants for one, three or six years at a moderate rent.
In the northern agricultural zone, where the soil is poor and primitive
farming with free labour can hardly be made to pay, the proprietors had to
let their land at a small rent, and those of them who could not find places in
the rural administration migrated to the towns and sought employment in
the public service or in the numerous commercial and industrial enterprises
which were springing up at that time. There they have since remained. Their
country-houses, if inhabited at all, are occupied only for a few months in
summer, and too often present a melancholy spectacle of neglect and
dilapidation. In the Black-earth Zone, on the contrary, where the soil still
possesses enough of its natural fertility to make farming on a large scale
profitable, the estates are in a very different condition. The owners cultivate

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at least a part of their property, and can easily let to the peasants at a fair
rent the land which they do not wish to farm themselves. Some have
adopted the metayage system; others get the field-work done by the
peasants at so much per acre. The more energetic, who have capital enough
at their disposal, organise farms with hired labourers on the European
model. If they are not so well off as formerly, it is because they have
adopted a less patriarchal and more expensive style of living. Their land has
doubled and trebled in value during the last thirty years, and their revenues
have increased, if not in proportion, at least considerably. In 1903 I visited a
number of estates in this region and found them in a very prosperous
condition, with agricultural machines of the English or American types, an
increasing variety in the rotation of crops, greatly improved breeds of cattle
and horses, and all the other symptoms of a gradual transition to a more
intensive and more rational system of agriculture.
It must be admitted, however, that even in the Black-earth Zone the
proprietors have formidable difficulties to contend with, the chief of which
are the scarcity of good farm-labourers, the frequent droughts, the low price
of cereals, and the delay in getting the grain conveyed to the seaports. On
each of these difficulties and the remedies that might be applied I could
write a separate chapter, but I fear to overtax the reader's patience, and shall
therefore confine myself to a few remarks about the labour question. On
this subject the complaints are loud and frequent all over the country. The
peasants, it is said, have become lazy, careless, addicted to drunkenness,
and shamelessly dishonest with regard to their obligations, so that it is
difficult to farm even in the old primitive fashion and impossible to
introduce radical improvements in the methods of culture. In these
sweeping accusations there is a certain amount of truth. That the muzhik,
when working for others, exerts himself as little as possible; that he pays
little attention to the quality of the work done; that he shows a reckless
carelessness with regard to his employer's property; that he is capable of
taking money in advance and failing to fulfil his contract; that he
occasionally gets drunk; and that he is apt to commit certain acts of petty
larceny when he gets the chance—all this is undoubtedly true, whatever
biassed theorists and sentimental peasant-worshippers may say to the
contrary.* It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the fault is
entirely on the side of the peasants, and equally erroneous to believe that
the evils might be remedied, as is often suggested, by greater severity on the

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part of the tribunals, or by an improved system of passports. Farming with
free labour, like every other department of human activity, requires a fair
amount of knowledge, judgment, prudence, and tact, which cannot be
replaced by ingenious legislation or judicial severity. In engaging labourers
or servants it is necessary to select them carefully and make such conditions
that they feel it to be to their interest to fulfil their contract loyally. This is
too often overlooked by the Russian land-owners. From false views of
economy they are inclined to choose the cheapest labourer without
examining closely his other qualifications, or they take advantage of the
peasant's pecuniary embarrassments and make with him a contract which it
is hardly possible for him to fulfil. In spring, for instance, when his store of
provisions is exhausted and he is being hard pressed by the tax-collector,
they supply him with rye-meal or advance him a small sum of money on
condition of his undertaking to do a relatively large amount of summer
work. He knows that the contract is unfair to him, but what is he to do? He
must get food for himself and his family and a little ready money for his
taxes, for the Communal authorities will probably sell his cow if he does
not pay his arrears.** In desperation he accepts the conditions and puts off
the evil day—consoling himself with the reflection that perhaps (avos')
something may turn up in the meantime—but when the time comes for
fulfilling his engagements the dilemma revives. According to the contract
he ought to work nearly the whole summer for the proprietor; but he has his
own land to attend to, and he has to make provision for the winter. In such
circumstances the temptation to evade the terms of the contract is probably
too strong to be resisted.

* Amongst themselves the peasants are not addicted to
thieving, as is proved by the fact that they habitually
leave their doors unlocked when the inmates of the house are
working in the fields; but if the muzhik finds in the
proprietor's farmyard a piece of iron or a bit of rope, or
any of those little things that he constantly requires and
has difficulty in obtaining, he is very apt to pick it up
and carry it home. Gathering firewood in the landlord's
forest he does not consider as theft, because "God planted
the trees and watered them," and in the time of serfage he
was allowed to supply himself with firewood in this way.

** Until last year (1904) they could use also corporal
punishment as a means of pressure, and I am not sure that
they do not occasionally use it still, though it is no
longer permitted by law.

Page 506

In Russia, as in other countries, the principle holds true that for good
labour a fair price must be paid. Several large proprietors of my
acquaintance who habitually act on this principle assure me that they
always obtain as much good labour as they require. I must add, however,
that these fortunate proprietors have the advantage of possessing a
comfortable amount of working capital, and are therefore not compelled, as
so many of their less fortunate neighbours are, to manage their estates on
the hand-to-mouth principle.
It is only, I fear, a minority of the landed proprietors that have grappled
successfully with these and other difficulties of their position. As a class
they are impoverished and indebted, but this state of things is not due
entirely to serf-emancipation. The indebtedness of the Noblesse is a
hereditary peculiarity of much older date. By some authorities it is
attributed to the laws of Peter the Great, by which all nobles were obliged to
spend the best part of their lives in the military or civil service, and to leave
the management of their estates to incompetent stewards. However that may
be, it is certain that from the middle of the eighteenth century downwards
the fact has frequently occupied the attention of the Government, and
repeated attempts have been made to alleviate the evil. The Empress
Elizabeth, Catherine II., Paul, Alexander I., Nicholas I., Alexander II., and
Alexander III. tried successively, as one of the older ukazes expressed it, "to
free the Noblesse from debt and from greedy money-lenders, and to prevent
hereditary estates from passing into the hands of strangers." The means
commonly adopted was the creation of mortgage banks founded and
controlled by the Government for the purpose of advancing money to
landed proprietors at a comparatively low rate of interest.
These institutions may have been useful to the few who desired to
improve their estates, but they certainly did not cure, and rather tended to
foster, the inveterate improvidence of the many. On the eve of the
Emancipation the proprietors were indebted to the Government for the sum
of 425 millions of roubles, and 69 per cent. of their serfs were mortgaged. A
portion of this debt was gradually extinguished by the redemption
operation, so that in 1880 over 300 millions had been paid off, but in the
meantime new debts were being contracted. In 1873-74 nine private land-
mortgage banks were created, and there was such a rush to obtain money
from them that their paper was a glut in the market, and became seriously
depreciated. When the prices of grain rose in 1875-80 the mortgage debt

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was diminished, but when they began to fall in 1880 it again increased, and
in 1881 it stood at 396 millions. As the rate of interest was felt to be very
burdensome there was a strong feeling among the landed proprietors at that
time that the Government ought to help them, and in 1883 the nobles of the
province of Orel ventured to address the Emperor on the subject. In reply to
the address, Alexander III., who had strong Conservative leanings, was
graciously pleased to declare in an ukaz that "it was really time to do
something to help the Noblesse," and accordingly a new land-mortgage
bank for the Noblesse was created. The favourable terms offered by it were
taken advantage of to such an extent that in the first four years of its activity
(1886-90) it advanced to the proprietors over 200 million roubles. Then
came two famine years, and in 1894 the mortgage debt of the Noblesse in
that and other credit establishments was estimated at 994 millions. It has
since probably increased rather than diminished, for in that year the prices
of grain began to fall steadily on all the corn-exchanges of the world, and
they have never since recovered.
By means of mortgages some proprietors succeeded in weathering the
storm, but many gave up the struggle altogether, and settled in the towns. In
the space of thirty years 20,000 of them sold their estates, and thus, between
1861 and 1892, the area of land possessed by the Noblesse diminished 30
per cent.—from 77,804,000 to 55,500,000 dessyatins.
This expropriation of the Noblesse, as it is called, was evidently not the
result merely of the temporary economic disturbance caused by the
abolition of serfage, for as time went on it became more rapid. During the
first twenty years the average annual amount of Noblesse land sold was
517,000 dessyatins, and it rose steadily until 1892-96, when it reached the
amount of 785,000. As I have already stated, the townward movement of
the proprietors was strongest in the barren Northern provinces. In the
province of Olonetz, for example, they have already parted with 87 per
cent. of their land. In the black-soil region, on the contrary, there is no
province in which more than 27 per cent. of the Noblesse land has been
alienated, and in one province (Tula) the amount is only 19 per cent.
The habit of mortgaging and selling estates does not necessarily mean the
impoverishment of the landlords as a class. If the capital raised in that way
is devoted to agricultural improvements, the result may be an increase of
wealth. Unfortunately, in Russia the realised capital was usually not so

Page 508

employed. A very large proportion of it was spent unproductively, partly in
luxuries and living abroad, and partly in unprofitable commercial and
industrial speculations. The industrial and railway fever which raged at the
time induced many to risk and lose their capital, and it had indirectly an
injurious effect on all by making money plentiful in the towns and creating
a more expensive style of living, from which the landed gentry could not
hold entirely aloof.
So far I have dwelt on the dark shadows of the picture, but it is not all
shadow. In the last forty years the production and export of grain, which
constitute the chief source of revenue for the Noblesse, have increased
enormously, thanks mainly to the improved means of transport. In the first
decade after the Emancipation (1860-70) the average annual export did not
exceed 88 million puds; in the second decade (1870-80) it leapt up to 218
millions; and so it went up steadily until in the last decade of the century it
had reached 388 millions—i.e., over six million tons. At the same time the
home trade had increased likewise in consequence of the rapidly growing
population of the towns. All this must have enriched the land-proprietors.
Not to such an extent, it is true, as the figures seem to indicate, because the
old prices could not be maintained. Rye, for example, which in 1868 stood
at 129 kopeks per pud, fell as low as 56, and during the rest of the century,
except during a short time in 1881-82 and the famine years of 1891-92,
when there was very little surplus to sell, it never rose above 80. Still, the
increase in quantity more than counterbalanced the fall in price. For
example: in 1881 the average price of grain per pud was 119, and in 1894 it
had sunk to 59; but the amount exported during that time rose from 203 to
617 million puds, and the sum received for it had risen from 242 to 369
millions of roubles. Surely the whole of that enormous sum was not
squandered on luxuries and unprofitable speculation!
The pessimists, however—and in Russia their name is legion—will not
admit that any permanent advantage has been derived from this enormous
increase in exports. On the contrary, they maintain that it is a national
misfortune, because it is leading rapidly to a state of permanent
impoverishment. It quickly exhausted, they say, the large reserves of grain
in the village, so that as soon as there was a very bad harvest the
Government had to come to the rescue and feed the starving peasantry.
Worse than this, it compromised the future prosperity of the country. Being
in pecuniary difficulties, and consequently impatient to make money, the

Page 509

proprietors increased inordinately the area of grain-producing land at the
expense of pasturage and forests, with the result that the live stock and the
manuring of the land were diminished, the fertility of the soil impaired, and
the necessary quantity of moisture in the atmosphere greatly lessened.
There is some truth in this contention; but it would seem that the soil and
climate have not been affected so much as the pessimists suppose, because
in recent years there have been some very good harvests.
On the whole, then, I think it may be justly said that the efforts of the
landed proprietors to work their estates without serf labour have not as yet
been brilliantly successful. Those who have failed are in the habit of
complaining that they have not received sufficient support from the
Government, which is accused of having systematically sacrificed the
interests of agriculture, the mainstay of the national resources, to the
creation of artificial and unnecessary manufacturing industries. How far
such complaints and accusations are well founded I shall not attempt to
decide. It is a complicated polemical question, into which the reader would
probably decline to accompany me. Let us examine rather what influence
the above-mentioned changes have had on the peasantry.

Page 510

Page 511

CHAPTER XXXI
THE EMANCIPATED PEASANTRY

The Effects of Liberty—Difficulty of Obtaining Accurate Information—
Pessimist Testimony of the Proprietors—Vague Replies of the Peasants—
My Conclusions in 1877—Necessity of Revising Them—My Investigations
Renewed in 1903—Recent Researches by Native Political Economists—
Peasant Impoverishment Universally Recognised—Various Explanations
Suggested—Demoralisation of the Common People—Peasant Self-
government—Communal System of Land Tenure—Heavy Taxation—
Disruption of Peasant Families—Natural Increase of Population—
Remedies Proposed—Migration—Reclamation of Waste Land—Land-
purchase by Peasantry—Manufacturing Industry—Improvement of
Agricultural Methods—Indications of Progress.
At the commencement of last chapter I pointed out in general terms the
difficulty of describing clearly the immediate consequences of the
Emancipation. In beginning now to speak of the influence which the great
reform has had on the peasantry, I feel that the difficulty has reached its
climax. The foreigner who desires merely to gain a general idea of the
subject cannot be expected to take an interest in details, and even if he took
the trouble to examine them attentively, he would derive from the labour
little real information. What he wishes is a clear, concise, and dogmatic
statement of general results. Has the material and moral condition of the
peasantry improved since the Emancipation? That is the simple question
which he has to put, and he naturally expects a simple, categorical answer.
In beginning my researches in this interesting field of inquiry, I had no
adequate conception of the difficulties awaiting me. I imagined that I had
merely to question intelligent, competent men who had had abundant
opportunities of observation, and to criticise and boil down the information
collected; but when I put this method of investigation to the test of
experience it proved unsatisfactory. Very soon I came to perceive that my
authorities were very far from being impartial observers. Most of them were
evidently suffering from shattered illusions. They had expected that the

Page 512

Emancipation would produce instantaneously a wonderful improvement in
the life and character of the rural population, and that the peasant would
become at once a sober, industrious, model agriculturist.
These expectations were not realised. One year passed, five years passed,
ten years passed, and the expected transformation did not take place. On the
contrary, there appeared certain very ugly phenomena which were not at all
in the programme. The peasants began to drink more and to work less,* and
the public life which the Communal institutions produced was by no means
of a desirable kind. The "bawlers" (gorlopany) acquired a prejudicial
influence in the Village Assemblies, and in very many Volosts the peasant
judges, elected by their fellow-villagers, acquired a bad habit of selling their
decisions for vodka. The natural consequence of all this was that those who
had indulged in exaggerated expectations sank into a state of inordinate
despondency, and imagined things to be much worse than they really were.

* I am not at all sure that the peasants really drank more,
but such was, and still is, a very general conviction.

For different reasons, those who had not indulged in exaggerated
expectations, and had not sympathised with the Emancipation in the form in
which it was effected, were equally inclined to take a pessimistic view of
the situation. In every ugly phenomenon they found a confirmation of their
opinions. The result was precisely what they had foretold. The peasants had
used their liberty and their privileges to their own detriment and to the
detriment of others!
The extreme "Liberals" were also inclined, for reasons of their own, to
join in the doleful chorus. They desired that the condition of the peasantry
should be further improved by legislative enactments, and accordingly they
painted the evils in as dark colours as possible.
Thus, from various reasons, the majority of the educated classes were
unduly disposed to represent to themselves and to others the actual
condition of the peasantry in a very unfavourable light, and I felt that from
them there was no hope of obtaining the lumen siccum which I desired. I
determined, therefore, to try the method of questioning the peasants
themselves. Surely they must know whether their condition was better or
worse than it had been before their Emancipation.

Page 513

Again I was doomed to disappointment. A few months' experience
sufficed to convince me that my new method was by no means so effectual
as I had imagined. Uneducated people rarely make generalisations which
have no practical utility, and I feel sure that very few Russian peasants ever
put to themselves the question: Am I better off now than I was in the time of
serfage? When such a question is put to them they feel taken aback. And in
truth it is no easy matter to sum up the two sides of the account and draw an
accurate balance, save in those exceptional cases in which the proprietor
flagrantly abused his authority. The present money-dues and taxes are often
more burdensome than the labour-dues in the old times. If the serfs had a
great many ill-defined obligations to fulfil—such as the carting of the
master's grain to market, the preparing of his firewood, the supplying him
with eggs, chickens, home-made linen, and the like—they had, on the other
hand, a good many ill-defined privileges. They grazed their cattle during a
part of the year on the manor-land; they received firewood and occasionally
logs for repairing their huts; sometimes the proprietor lent them or gave
them a cow or a horse when they had been visited by the cattle-plague or
the horse-stealer; and in times of famine they could look to their master for
support. All this has now come to an end. Their burdens and their privileges
have been swept away together, and been replaced by clearly defined,
unbending, unelastic legal relations. They have now to pay the market-price
for every stick of firewood which they burn, for every log which they
require for repairing their houses, and for every rood of land on which to
graze their cattle. Nothing is now to be had gratis. The demand to pay is
encountered at every step. If a cow dies or a horse is stolen, the owner can
no longer go to the proprietor with the hope of receiving a present, or at
least a loan without interest, but must, if he has no ready money, apply to
the village usurer, who probably considers twenty or thirty per cent, as a by
no means exorbitant rate of interest.
Besides this, from the economic point of view village life has been
completely revolutionised. Formerly the members of a peasant family
obtained from their ordinary domestic resources nearly all they required.
Their food came from their fields, cabbage-garden, and farmyard. Materials
for clothing were supplied by their plots of flax and their sheep, and were
worked up into linen and cloth by the female members of the household.
Fuel, as I have said, and torches wherewith to light the izba—for oil was
too expensive and petroleum was unknown—were obtained gratis. Their

Page 514

sheep, cattle, and horses were bred at home, and their agricultural
implements, except in so far as a little iron was required, could be made by
themselves without any pecuniary expenditure. Money was required only
for the purchase of a few cheap domestic utensils, such as pots, pans,
knives, hatchets, wooden dishes, and spoons, and for the payment of taxes,
which were small in amount and often paid by the proprietor. In these
circumstances the quantity of money in circulation among the peasants was
infinitesimally small, the few exchanges which took place in a village being
generally effected by barter. The taxes, and the vodka required for village
festivals, weddings, or funerals, were the only large items of expenditure for
the year, and they were generally covered by the sums brought home by the
members of the family who went to work in the towns.
Very different is the present condition of affairs. The spinning, weaving,
and other home industries have been killed by the big factories, and the flax
and wool have to be sold to raise a little ready money for the numerous new
items of expenditure. Everything has to be bought—clothes, firewood,
petroleum, improved agricultural implements, and many other articles
which are now regarded as necessaries of life, whilst comparatively little is
earned by working in the towns, because the big families have been broken
up, and a household now consists usually of husband and wife, who must
both remain at home, and children who are not yet bread-winners. Recalling
to mind all these things and the other drawbacks and advantages of his
actual position, the old muzhik has naturally much difficulty in striking a
balance, and he may well be quite sincere when, on being asked whether
things now are on the whole better or worse than in the time of serfage, he
scratches the back of his head and replies hesitatingly, with a mystified
expression on his wrinkled face: "How shall I say to you? They are both
better and worse!" ("Kak vam skazat'? I lûtche i khûdzhe!") If, however,
you press him further and ask whether he would himself like to return to the
old state of things, he is pretty sure to answer, with a slow shake of the head
and a twinkle in his eye, as if some forgotten item in the account had
suddenly recurred to him: "Oh, no!"
What materially increases the difficulty of this general computation is
that great changes have taken place in the well-being of the particular
households. Some have greatly prospered, while others have become
impoverished. That is one of the most characteristic consequences of the
Emancipation. In the old times the general economic stagnation and the

Page 515

uncontrolled authority of the proprietor tended to keep all the households of
a village on the same level. There was little opportunity for an intelligent,
enterprising serf to become rich, and if he contrived to increase his revenue
he had probably to give a considerable share of it to the proprietor, unless
he had the good fortune to belong to a grand seigneur like Count
Sheremetief, who was proud of having rich men among his serfs. On the
other hand, the proprietor, for evident reasons of self-interest, as well as
from benevolent motives, prevented the less intelligent and less enterprising
members of the Commune from becoming bankrupt. The Communal
equality thus artificially maintained has now disappeared, the restrictions on
individual freedom of action have been removed, the struggle for life has
become intensified, and, as always happens in such circumstances, the
strong men go up in the world while the weak ones go to the wall. All over
the country we find on the one hand the beginnings of a village aristocracy
—or perhaps we should call it a plutocracy, for it is based on money—and
on the other hand an ever-increasing pauperism. Some peasants possess
capital, with which they buy land outside the Commune or embark in trade,
while others have to sell their live stock, and have sometimes to cede to
neighbours their share of the Communal property. This change in rural life
is so often referred to that, in order to express it a new, barbarous word,
differentsiatsia (differentiation) has been invented.
Hoping to obtain fuller information with the aid of official protection, I
attached myself to one of the travelling sections of an agricultural
Commission appointed by the Government, and during a whole summer I
helped to collect materials in the provinces bordering on the Volga. The
inquiry resulted in a gigantic report of nearly 2,500 folio pages, but the
general conclusions were extremely vague. The peasantry, it was said, were
passing, like the landed proprietors, through a period of transition, in which
the main features of their future normal life had not yet become clearly
defined. In some localities their condition had decidedly improved, whereas
in others it had improved little or not at all. Then followed a long list of
recommendations in favour of Government assistance, better agronomic
education, competitive exhibitions, more varied rotation of crops, and
greater zeal on the part of the clergy in disseminating among the people
moral principles in general and love of work in particular.
Not greatly enlightened by this official activity, I returned to my private
studies, and at the end of six years I published my impressions and

Page 516

conclusions in the first edition of this work. While recognising that there
was much uncertainty as to the future, I was inclined, on the whole, to take
a hopeful view of the situation. I was unable, however, to maintain
permanently that comfortable frame of mind. After my departure from
Russia in 1878, the accounts which reached me from various parts of the
country became blacker and blacker, and were partly confirmed by short
tours which I made in 1889-1896. At last, in the summer of 1903, I
determined to return to some of my old haunts and look at things with my
own eyes. At that moment some hospitable friends invited me to pay them a
visit at their country-house in the province of Smolensk, and I gladly
accepted the invitation, because Smolensk, when I knew it formerly, was
one of the poorest provinces, and I thought it well to begin my new studies
by examining the impoverishment, of which I had heard so much, at its
maximum.
From the railway station at Viazma, where I arrived one morning at
sunrise, I had some twenty miles to drive, and as soon as I got clear of the
little town I began my observations. What I saw around me seemed to
contradict the sombre accounts I had received. The villages through which I
passed had not at all the look of dilapidation and misery which I expected.
On the contrary, the houses were larger and better constructed than they
used to be, and each of them had a chimney! That latter fact was important
because formerly a large proportion of the peasants of this region had no
such luxury, and allowed the smoke to find its exit by the open door. In vain
I looked for a hut of the old type, and my yamstchik assured me I should
have to go a long way to find one. Then I noticed a good many iron ploughs
of the European model, and my yamstchik informed me that their
predecessor, the sokha with which I had been so familiar, had entirely
disappeared from the district. Next I noticed that in the neighbourhood of
the villages flax was grown in large quantities. That was certainly not an
indication of poverty, because flax is a valuable product which requires to
be well manured, and plentiful manure implies a considerable quantity of
live stock. Lastly, before arriving at my destination, I noticed clover being
grown in the fields. This made me open my eyes with astonishment,
because the introduction of artificial grasses into the traditional rotation of
crops indicates the transition to a higher and more intensive system of
agriculture. As I had never seen clover in Russia except on the estates of
very advanced proprietors, I said to my yamstchik:

Page 517

"Listen, little brother! That field belongs to the landlord?"
"Not at all, Master; it is muzhik-land."
On arriving at the country-house I told my friends what I had seen, and
they explained it to me. Smolensk is no longer one of the poorer provinces;
it has become comparatively prosperous. In two or three districts large
quantities of flax are produced and give the cultivators a big revenue; in
other districts plenty of remunerative work is supplied by the forests.
Everywhere a considerable proportion of the younger men go regularly to
the towns and bring home savings enough to pay the taxes and make a little
surplus in the domestic budget. A few days afterwards the village secretary
brought me his books, and showed me that there were practically no arrears
of taxation.
Passing on to other provinces I found similar proofs of progress and
prosperity, but at the same time not a few indications of impoverishment;
and I was rapidly relapsing into my previous state of uncertainty as to
whether any general conclusions could be drawn, when an old friend,
himself a first-rate authority with many years of practical experience, came
to my assistance.* He informed me that a number of specialists had recently
made detailed investigations into the present economic conditions of the
rural population, and he kindly placed at my disposal, in his charming
country-house near Moscow, the voluminous researches of these
investigators. Here, during a good many weeks, I revelled in the statistical
materials collected, and to the best of my ability I tested the conclusions
drawn from them. Many of these conclusions I had to dismiss with the
Scotch verdict of "not proven," whilst others seemed to me worthy of
acceptance. Of these latter the most important were those drawn from the
arrears of taxation.

* I hope I am committing no indiscretion when I say that the
old friend in question was Prince Alexander Stcherbatof of
Vasilefskoe.

The arrears in the payment of taxes may be regarded as a pretty safe
barometer for testing the condition of the rural population, because the
peasant habitually pays his rates and taxes when he has the means of doing
so; when he falls seriously and permanently into arrears it may be assumed
that he is becoming impoverished. If the arrears fluctuate from year to year,
the causes of the impoverishment may be regarded as accidental and

Page 518

perhaps temporary, but if they steadily accumulate, we must conclude that
there is something radically wrong. Bearing these facts in mind, let us hear
what the statistics say.
During the first twenty years after the Emancipation (1861-81) things
went on in their old grooves. The poor provinces remained poor, and the
fertile provinces showed no signs of distress. During the next twenty years
(1881-1901) the arrears of the whole of European Russia rose, roughly
speaking, from 27 to 144 millions of roubles, and the increase, strange to
say, took place in the fertile provinces. In 1890, for example, out of 52
millions, nearly 41 millions, or 78 per cent., fell to the share of the
provinces of the Black-earth Zone. In seven of these the average arrears per
male, which had been in 1882 only 90 kopeks, rose in 1893 to 600, and in
1899 to 2,200! And this accumulation had taken place in spite of reductions
of taxation to the extent of 37 million roubles in 1881-83, and successive
famine grants from the Treasury in 1891-99 to the amount of 203 millions.*
On the other hand, in the provinces with a poor soil the arrears had greatly
decreased. In Smolensk, for example, they had sunk from 202 per cent, to
13 per cent. of the annual sum to be paid, and in nearly all the other
provinces of the west and north a similar change for the better had taken
place.
These and many other figures which I might quote show that a great and
very curious economic revolution has been gradually effected. The Black-
earth Zone, which was formerly regarded as the inexhaustible granary of
the Empire, has become impoverished, whilst the provinces which were
formerly regarded as hopelessly poor are now in a comparatively
flourishing condition. This fact has been officially recognised. In a
classification of the provinces according to their degree of prosperity, drawn
up by a special commission of experts in 1903, those with a poor light soil
appear at the top, and those with the famous black earth are at the bottom of
the list. In the deliberations of the commission many reasons for this
extraordinary state of things are adduced. Most of them have merely a local
significance. The big fact, taken as a whole, seems to me to show that, in
consequence of certain changes of which I shall speak presently, the
peasantry of European Russia can no longer live by the traditional modes of
agriculture, even in the most fertile districts, and require for their support
some subsidiary occupations such as are practised in the less fertile
provinces.

Page 519

* In 1901 an additional famine grant of 33 1/2 million
roubles had to be made by the Government.

Another sign of impoverishment is the decrease in the quantity of live
stock. According to the very imperfect statistics available, for every
hundred inhabitants the number of horses has decreased from 26 to 17, the
number of cattle from 36 to 25, and the number of sheep from 73 to 40.
This is a serious matter, because it means that the land is not so well
manured and cultivated as formerly, and is consequently not so productive.
Several economists have attempted to fix precisely to what extent the
productivity has decreased, but I confess I have little faith in the accuracy
of their conclusions. M. Polenof, for example, a most able and
conscientious investigator, calculates that between 1861 and 1895, all over
Russia, the amount of food produced, in relation to the number of the
population, has decreased by seven per cent. His methods of calculation are
ingenious, but the statistical data with which he operates are so far from
accurate that his conclusions on this point have, in my opinion, little or no
scientific value. With all due deference to Russian economists, I may say
parenthetically that they are very found of juggling with carelessly collected
statistics, as if their data were mathematical quantities.
Several of the Zemstvos have grappled with this question of peasant
impoverishment, and the data which they have collected make a very
doleful impression. In the province of Moscow, for example, a careful
investigation gave the following results: Forty per cent. of the peasant
households had no longer any horses, 15 per cent. had given up agriculture
altogether, and about 10 per cent. had no longer any land. We must not,
however, assume, as is often done, that the peasant families who have no
live stock and no longer till the land are utterly ruined. In reality many of
them are better off than their neighbours who appear as prosperous in the
official statistics, having found profitable occupation in the home industries,
in the towns, in the factories, or on the estates of the landed proprietors. It
must be remembered that Moscow is the centre of one of the regions in
which manufacturing industry has progressed with gigantic strides during
the last half-century, and it would be strange indeed if, in such a region, the
peasantry who supply the labour to the towns and factories remained
thriving agriculturists. That many Russians are surprised and horrified at the
actual state of things shows to what an extent the educated classes are still
under the illusion that Russia can create for herself a manufacturing

Page 520

industry capable of competing with that of Western Europe without
uprooting from the soil a portion of her rural population.
It is only in the purely agricultural regions that families officially classed
as belonging to the peasantry may be regarded as on the brink of pauperism
because they have no live stock, and even with regard to them I should
hesitate to make such an assumption, because the muzhiks, as I have
already had occasion to remark, have strange nomadic habits unknown to
the rural population of other countries. It is a mistake, therefore, to calculate
the Russian peasant's budget exclusively on the basis of local resources.
To the pessimists who assure me that according to their calculations the
peasantry in general must be on the brink of starvation, I reply that there are
many facts, even in the statistical tables on which they rely, which run
counter to their deductions. Let me quote one by way of illustration. The
total amount of deposits in savings banks, about one-fourth of which is
believed to belong to the rural population, rose in the course of six years
(1894-1900) from 347 to 680 millions of roubles. Besides the savings
banks, there existed in the rural districts on 1st December, 1902, no less
than 1,614 small-credit institutions, with a total capital (1st January, 1901)
of 69 million roubles, of which only 4,653,000 had been advanced by the
State Bank and the Zemstvo, the remainder coming in from private sources.
This is not much for a big country like Russia, but it is a beginning, and it
suggests that the impoverishment is not so severe and so universal as the
pessimists would have us believe.
There is thus room for differences of opinion as to how far the peasantry
have become impoverished, but there is no doubt that their condition is far
from satisfactory, and we have to face the important problem why the
abolition of serfage has not produced the beneficent consequences which
even moderate men so confidently predicted, and how the present
unsatisfactory state of things is to be remedied.
The most common explanation among those who have never seriously
studied the subject is that it all comes from the demoralisation of the
common people. In this view there is a modicum of truth. That the
peasantry injure their material welfare by drunkenness and improvidence
there can be no reasonable doubt, as is shown by the comparatively
flourishing state of certain villages of Old Ritualists and Molokanye in
which there is no drunkenness, and in which the community exercises a

Page 521

strong moral control over the individual members. If the Orthodox Church
could make the peasantry refrain from the inordinate use of strong drink as
effectually as it makes them refrain during a great part of the year from
animal food, and if it could instil into their minds a few simple moral
principles as successfully as it has inspired them with a belief in the
efficacy of the Sacraments, it would certainly confer on them an inestimable
benefit. But this is not to be expected. The great majority of the parish
priests are quite unfit for such a task, and the few who have aspirations in
that direction rarely acquire a perceptible moral influence over their
parishioners. Perhaps more is to be expected from the schoolmaster than
from the priest, but it will be long before the schools can produce even a
partial moral regeneration. Their first influence, strange as the assertion
may seem, is often in a diametrically opposite direction. When only a few
peasants in a village can read and write they have such facilities for
overreaching their "dark" neighbours that they are apt to employ their
knowledge for dishonest purposes; and thus it occasionally happens that the
man who has the most education is the greatest scoundrel in the Mir. Such
facts are often used by the opponents of popular education, but in reality
they supply a good reason for disseminating primary education as rapidly as
possible. When all the peasants have learned to read and write they will
present a less inviting field for swindling, and the temptations to dishonesty
will be proportionately diminished. Meanwhile, it is only fair to state that
the common assertions about drunkenness being greatly on the increase are
not borne out by the official statistics concerning the consumption of
spirituous liquors.
After drunkenness, the besetting sin which is supposed to explain the
impoverishment of the peasantry is incorrigible laziness. On that subject I
feel inclined to put in a plea of extenuating circumstances in favour of the
muzhik. Certainly he is very slow in his movements—slower perhaps than
the English rustic—and he has a marvellous capacity for wasting valuable
time without any perceptible qualms of conscience; but he is in this respect,
if I may use a favourite phrase of the Social Scientists, "the product of
environment." To the proprietors who habitually reproach him with time-
wasting he might reply with a very strong tu quoque argument, and to all
the other classes the argument might likewise be addressed. The St.
Petersburg official, for example, who writes edifying disquisitions about
peasant indolence, considers that for himself attendance at his office for

Page 522

four hours, a large portion of which is devoted to the unproductive labour of
cigarette smoking, constitutes a very fair day's work. The truth is that in
Russia the struggle for life is not nearly so intense as in more densely
populated countries, and society is so constituted that all can live without
very strenuous exertion. The Russians seem, therefore, to the traveller who
comes from the West an indolent, apathetic race. If the traveller happens to
come from the East—especially if he has been living among pastoral races
—the Russians will appear to him energetic and laborious. Their character
in this respect corresponds to their geographical position: they stand
midway between the laborious, painstaking, industrious population of
Western Europe and the indolent, undisciplined, spasmodically energetic
populations of Central Asia. They are capable of effecting much by
vigorous, intermittent effort—witness the peasant at harvest-time, or the St.
Petersburg official when some big legislative project has to be submitted to
the Emperor within a given time—but they have not yet learned regular
laborious habits. In short, the Russians might move the world if it could be
done by a jerk, but they are still deficient in that calm perseverance and
dogged tenacity which characterise the Teutonic race.
Without seeking further to determine how far the moral defects of the
peasantry have a deleterious influence on their material welfare, I proceed
to examine the external causes which are generally supposed to contribute
largely to their impoverishment, and will deal first with the evils of peasant
self-government.
That the peasant self-government is very far from being in a satisfactory
condition must be admitted by any impartial observer. The more laborious
and well-to-do peasants, unless they wish to abuse their position directly or
indirectly for their own advantage, try to escape election as office-bearers,
and leave the administration in the hands of the less respectable members.
Not unfrequently a Volost Elder trades with the money he collects as dues
or taxes; and sometimes, when he becomes insolvent, the peasants have to
pay their taxes and dues a second time. The Village Assemblies, too, have
become worse than they were in the days of serfage. At that time the Heads
of Households—who, it must be remembered, have alone a voice in the
decisions—were few in number, laborious, and well-to-do, and they kept
the lazy, unruly members under strict control. Now that the large families
have been broken up and almost every adult peasant is Head of a
Household, the Communal affairs are sometimes decided by a noisy

Page 523

majority; and certain Communal decisions may be obtained by "treating the
Mir"—that is to say, by supplying a certain amount of vodka. Often I have
heard old peasants speak of these things, and finish their recital by some
such remark as this: "There is no order now; the people have been spoiled;
it was better in the time of the masters."
These evils are very real, and I have no desire to extenuate them, but I
believe they are by no means so great as is commonly supposed. If the lazy,
worthless members of the Commune had really the direction of Communal
affairs we should find that in the Northern Agricultural Zone, where it is
necessary to manure the soil, the periodical redistributions of the
Communal land would be very frequent; for in a new distribution the lazy
peasant has a good chance of getting a well-manured lot in exchange for the
lot which he has exhausted. In reality, so far as my observations extend,
these general distributions of the land are not more frequent than they were
before.
Of the various functions of the peasant self-government the judicial are
perhaps the most frequently and the most severely criticised. And certainly
not without reason, for the Volost Courts are too often accessible to the
influence of alcohol, and in some districts the peasants say that he who
becomes a judge takes a sin on his soul. I am not at all sure, however, that it
would be well to abolish these courts altogether, as some people propose. In
many respects they are better suited to peasant requirements than the
ordinary tribunals. Their procedure is infinitely simpler, more expeditious,
and incomparably less expensive, and they are guided by traditional custom
and plain common-sense, whereas the ordinary tribunals have to judge
according to the civil law, which is unknown to the peasantry and not
always applicable to their affairs.
Few ordinary judges have a sufficiently intimate knowledge of the
minute details of peasant life to be able to decide fairly the cases that are
brought before the Volost Courts; and even if a Justice had sufficient
knowledge he could not adopt the moral and juridical notions of the
peasantry. These are often very different from those of the upper classes. In
cases of matrimonial separation, for instance, the educated man naturally
assumes that, if there is any question of aliment, it should be paid by the
husband to the wife. The peasant, on the contrary, assumes as naturally that
it should be paid by the wife to the husband—or rather to the Head of the

Page 524

Household—as a compensation for the loss of labour which her desertion
involves. In like manner, according to traditional peasant-law, if an
unmarried son is working away from home, his earnings do not belong to
himself, but to the family, and in Volost Court they could be claimed by the
Head of the Household.
Occasionally, it is true, the peasant judges allow their respect for old
traditional conceptions in general and for the authority of parents in
particular, to carry them a little too far. I was told lately of one affair which
took place not long ago, within a hundred miles of Moscow, in which the
judge decided that a respectable young peasant should be flogged because
he refused to give his father the money he earned as groom in the service of
a neighbouring proprietor, though it was notorious in the district that the
father was a disreputable old drunkard who carried to the kabak (gin-shop)
all the money he could obtain by fair means and foul. When I remarked to
my informant, who was not an admirer of peasant institutions, that the
incident reminded me of the respect for the patria potestas in old Roman
times, he stared at me with a look of surprise and indignation, and
exclaimed laconically, "Patria potestas? . . . Vodka!" He was evidently
convinced that the disreputable father had got his respectable son flogged
by "treating" the judges. In such cases flogging can no longer be used, for
the Volost Courts, as we have seen, were recently deprived of the right to
inflict corporal punishment.
These administrative and judicial abuses gradually reached the ears of the
Government, and in 1889 it attempted to remove them by creating a body of
Rural Supervisors (Zemskiye Natchalniki). Under their supervision and
control some abuses may have been occasionally prevented or corrected,
and some rascally Volost secretaries may have been punished or dismissed,
but the peasant self-government as a whole has not been perceptibly
improved.
Let us glance now at the opinions of those who hold that the material
progress of the peasantry is prevented chiefly, not by the mere abuses of the
Communal administration, but by the essential principles of the Communal
institutions, and especially by the practice of periodically redistributing the
Communal land. From the theoretical point of view this question is one of
great interest, and it may acquire in the future an immense practical
significance; but for the present it has not, in my opinion, the importance

Page 525

which is usually attributed to it. There can be no doubt that it is much more
difficult to farm well on a large number of narrow strips of land, many of
which are at a great distance from the farmyard, than on a compact piece of
land which the farmer may divide and cultivate as he pleases; and there can
be as little doubt that the husbandman is more likely to improve his land if
his tenure is secure. All this and much more of the same kind must be
accepted as indisputable truth, but it has little direct bearing on the practical
question under consideration. We are not considering in the abstract
whether it would be better that the peasant should be a farmer with
abundant capital and all the modern scientific appliances, but simply the
practical question, What are the obstructions which at present prevent the
peasant from ameliorating his actual condition?
That the Commune prevents its members from adopting various systems
of high farming is a supposition which scarcely requires serious
consideration. The peasants do not yet think of any such radical
innovations; and if they did, they have neither the knowledge nor the capital
necessary to effect them. In many villages a few of the richer and more
intelligent peasants have bought land outside of the Commune and cultivate
it as they please, free from all Communal restraints; and I have always
found that they cultivate this property precisely in the same way as their
share of the Communal land. As to minor changes, we know by experience
that the Mir opposes to them no serious obstacles.
The cultivation of beet for the production of sugar has greatly increased
in the central and southwestern provinces, and flax is now largely produced
in Communes in northern districts where it was formerly cultivated merely
for domestic use. The Communal system is, in fact, extremely elastic, and
may be modified as soon as the majority of the members consider
modifications profitable. When the peasants begin to think of permanent
improvements, such as drainage, irrigation, and the like, they will find the
Communal institutions a help rather than an obstruction; for such
improvements, if undertaken at all, must be undertaken on a larger scale,
and the Mir is an already existing association. The only permanent
improvements which can be for the present profitably undertaken consist in
the reclaiming of waste land; and such improvements are already
sometimes attempted. I know at least of one case in which a Commune in
the province of Yaroslavl has reclaimed a considerable tract of waste land
by means of hired labourers. Nor does the Mir prevent in this respect

Page 526

individual initiative. In many Communes of the northern provinces it is a
received principle of customary law that if any member reclaims waste land
he is allowed to retain possession of it for a number of years proportionate
to the amount of labour expended.
But does not the Commune, as it exists, prevent good cultivation
according to the mode of agriculture actually in use?
Except in the far north and the steppe region, where the agriculture is of a
peculiar kind, adapted to the local conditions, the peasants invariably till
their land according to the ordinary three-field system, in which good
cultivation means, practically speaking, the plentiful use of manure. Does,
then, the existence of the Mir prevent the peasants from manuring their
fields well?
Many people who speak on this subject in an authoritative tone seem to
imagine that the peasants in general do not manure their fields at all. This
idea is an utter mistake. In those regions, it is true, where the rich black soil
still retains a large part of its virgin fertility, the manure is used as fuel, or
simply thrown away, because the peasants believe that it would not be
profitable to put it on their fields, and their conviction is, at least to some
extent, well founded;* but in the Northern Agricultural Zone, where
unmanured soil gives almost no harvest, the peasants put upon their fields
all the manure they possess. If they do not put enough it is simply because
they have not sufficient live stock.

* As recently as two years ago (1903) I found that one of
the most intelligent and energetic landlords of the province
of Voronezh followed in this respect the example of the
peasants, and he assured me that he had proved by experience
the advantage of doing so.

It is only in the southern provinces, where no manure is required, that
periodical re-distributions take place frequently. As we travel northward we
find the term lengthens; and in the Northern Agricultural Zone, where
manure is indispensable, general re-distributions are extremely rare. In the
province of Yaroslavl, for example, the Communal land is generally divided
into two parts: the manured land lying near the village, and the unmanured
land lying beyond. The latter alone is subject to frequent re-distribution. On
the former the existing tenures are rarely disturbed, and when it becomes
necessary to give a share to a new household, the change is effected with
the least possible prejudice to vested rights.

Page 527

The policy of the Government has always been to admit redistributions in
principle, but to prevent their too frequent recurrence. For this purpose the
Emancipation Law stipulated that they could be decreed only by a three-
fourths majority of the Village Assembly, and in 1893 a further obstacle was
created by a law providing that the minimum term between two re-
distributions should be twelve years, and that they should never be
undertaken without the sanction of the Rural Supervisor.
A certain number of Communes have made the experiment of
transforming the Communal tenure into hereditary allotments, and its only
visible effect has been that the allotments accumulate in the hands of the
richer and more enterprising peasants, and the poorer members of the
Commune become landless, while the primitive system of agriculture
remains unimproved.
Up to this point I have dealt with the so-called causes of peasant
impoverishment which are much talked of, but which are, in my opinion,
only of secondary importance. I pass now to those which are more tangible
and which have exerted on the condition of the peasantry a more palpable
influence. And, first, inordinate taxation.
This is a very big subject, on which a bulky volume might be written, but
I shall cut it very short, because I know that the ordinary reader does not
like to be bothered with voluminous financial statistics. Briefly, then, the
peasant has to pay three kinds of direct taxation: Imperial to the Central
Government, local to the Zemstvo, and Commune to the Mir and the Volost;
and besides these he has to pay a yearly sum for the redemption of the land-
allotment which he received at the time of the Emancipation. Taken
together, these form a heavy burden, but for ten or twelve years the
emancipated peasantry bore it patiently, without falling very deeply into
arrears. Then began to appear symptoms of distress, especially in the
provinces with a poor soil, and in 1872 the Government appointed a
Commission of Inquiry, in which I had the privilege of taking part
unofficially. The inquiry showed that something ought to be done, but at
that moment the Government was so busy with administrative reforms and
with trying to develop industry and commerce that it had little time to
devote to studying and improving the economic position of the silent, long-
suffering muzhik. It was not till nearly ten years later, when the
Government began to feel the pinch of the ever-increasing arrears, that it

Page 528

recognised the necessity of relieving the rural population. For this purpose
it abolished the salt-tax and the poll-tax and repeatedly lessened the burden
of the redemption-payments. At a later period (1899) it afforded further
relief by an important reform in the mode of collecting the direct taxes.
From the police, who often ruined peasant householders by applying
distraint indiscriminately, the collection of taxes was transferred to special
authorities who took into consideration the temporary pecuniary
embarrassments of the tax-payers. Another benefit conferred on the
peasantry by this reform is that an individual member of the Commune is
no longer responsible for the fiscal obligations of the Commune as a whole.
Since these alleviations have been granted the annual total demanded
from the peasantry for direct taxation and land-redemption payments is 173
million roubles, and the average annual sum to be paid by each peasant
household varies, according to the locality, from 11 1/2 to 20 roubles (21s.
6d. to 40s.). In addition to this annuity there is a heavy burden of
accumulated arrears, especially in the central and eastern provinces, which
amounted in 1899 to 143 millions. Of the indirect taxes I can say nothing
definite, because it is impossible to calculate, even approximately, the share
of them which falls on the rural population, but they must not be left out of
account. During the ten years of M. Witte's term of office the revenue of the
Imperial Treasury was nearly doubled, and though the increase was due
partly to improvements in the financial administration, we can hardly
believe that the peasantry did not in some measure contribute to it. In any
case, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for them, under actual conditions,
to improve their economic position. On that point all Russian economists
are agreed. One of the most competent and sober-minded of them, M.
Schwanebach, calculates that the head of a peasant household, after
deducting the grain required to feed his family, has to pay into the Imperial
Treasury, according to the district in which he resides, from 25 to 100 per
cent, of his agricultural revenue. If that ingenious calculation is even
approximately correct, we must conclude that further financial reforms are
urgently required, especially in those provinces where the population live
exclusively by agriculture.
Heavy as the burden of taxation undoubtedly is, it might perhaps be
borne without very serious inconvenience if the peasant families could
utilise productively all their time and strength. Unfortunately in the existing
economic organisation a great deal of their time and energy is necessarily

Page 529

wasted. Their economic life was radically dislocated by the Emancipation,
and they have not yet succeeded in reorganising it according to the new
conditions.
In the time of serfage an estate formed, from the economic point of view,
a co-operative agricultural association, under a manager who possessed
unlimited authority, and sometimes abused it, but who was generally
worldly-wise enough to understand that the prosperity of the whole required
the prosperity of the component parts. By the abolition of serfage the
association was dissolved and liquidated, and the strong, compact whole
fell into a heap of independent units, with separate and often mutually
hostile interests. Some of the disadvantages of this change for the peasantry
I have already enumerated above. The most important I have now to
mention. In virtue of the Emancipation Law each family received an
amount of land which tempted it to continue farming on its own account,
but which did not enable it to earn a living and pay its rates and taxes. The
peasant thus became a kind of amphibious creature—half farmer and half
something else—cultivating his allotment for a portion of his daily bread,
and obliged to have some other occupation wherewith to cover the
inevitable deficit in his domestic budget. If he was fortunate enough to find
near his home a bit of land to be let at a reasonable rent, he might cultivate
it in addition to his own and thereby gain a livelihood; but if he had not the
good luck to find such a piece of land in the immediate neighbourhood, he
had to look for some subsidiary occupation in which to employ his leisure
time; and where was such occupation to be found in an ordinary Russian
village? In former years he might have employed himself perhaps in carting
the proprietor's grain to distant markets or still more distant seaports, but
that means of making a little money has been destroyed by the extension of
railways. Practically, then, he is now obliged to choose between two
alternatives: either to farm his allotment and spend a great part of the year
in idleness, or to leave the cultivation of his allotment to his wife and
children and to seek employment elsewhere—often at such a distance that
his earnings hardly cover the expenses of the journey. In either case much
time and energy are wasted.
The evil results of this state of things were intensified by another change
which was brought about by the Emancipation. In the time of serfage the
peasant families, as I have already remarked, were usually very large. They
remained undivided, partly from the influence of patriarchal conceptions,

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but chiefly because the proprietors, recognising the advantage of large units,
prevented them from breaking up. As soon as the proprietor's authority was
removed, the process of disintegration began and spread rapidly. Every one
wished to be independent, and in a very short time nearly every able-bodied
married peasant had a house of his own. The economic consequences were
disastrous. A large amount of money had to be expended in constructing
new houses and farmsteadings; and the old habit of one male member
remaining at home to cultivate the land allotment with the female members
of the family whilst the others went to earn wages elsewhere had to be
abandoned. Many large families, which had been prosperous and
comfortable—rich according to peasant conceptions—dissolved into three
or four small ones, all on the brink of pauperism.
The last cause of peasant impoverishment that I have to mention is
perhaps the most important of all: I mean the natural increase of population
without a corresponding increase in the means of subsistence. Since the
Emancipation in 1861 the population has nearly doubled, whilst the amount
of Communal land has remained the same. It is not surprising, therefore,
that when talking with peasants about their actual condition, one constantly
hears the despairing cry, "Zemli malo!" ("There is not enough land"); and
one notices that those who look a little ahead ask anxiously: "What is to
become of our children? Already the Communal allotment is too small for
our wants, and the land outside is doubling and trebling in price! What will
it be in the future?" At the same time, not a few Russian economists tell us
—and their apprehensions are shared by foreign observers—that millions of
peasants are in danger of starvation in the near future.
Must we, then, accept for Russia the Malthus doctrine that population
increases more rapidly than the means of subsistence, and that starvation
can be avoided only by plague, pestilence, war, and other destructive
forces? I think not. It is quite true that, if the amount of land actually
possessed by the peasantry and the present system of cultivating it remained
unchanged, semi-starvation would be the inevitable result within a
comparatively short space of time; but the danger can be averted, and the
proper remedies are not far to seek. If Russia is suffering from over-
population, it must be her own fault, for she is, with the exception of
Norway and Sweden, the most thinly populated country in Europe, and she
has more than her share of fertile soil and mineral resources.

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A glance at the map showing the density of population in the various
provinces suggests an obvious remedy, and I am happy to say it is already
being applied. The population of the congested districts of the centre is
gradually spreading out, like a drop of oil on a sheet of soft paper, towards
the more thinly populated regions of the south and east. In this way the vast
region containing millions and millions of acres which lies to the north of
the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Caspian, and Central Asia is yearly
becoming more densely peopled, and agriculture is steadily encroaching on
the pastoral area. Breeders of sheep and cattle, who formerly lived and
throve in the western portion of that great expanse, are being pushed
eastwards by the rapid increase in the value of land, and their place is being
taken by enterprising tillers of the soil. Further north another stream of
emigration is flowing into Central Siberia. It does not flow so rapidly,
because in that part of the Empire, unlike the bare, fertile steppes of the
south, the land has to be cleared before the seed can be sown, and the
pioneer colonists have to work hard for a year or two before they get any
return for their labour; but the Government and private societies come to
their assistance, and for the last twenty years their numbers have been
steadily increasing. During the ten years 1886-96 the annual contingent rose
from 25,000 to 200,000, and the total number amounted to nearly 800,000.
For the subsequent period I have not been able to obtain the official
statistics, but a friend who has access to the official sources of information
on this subject assures me that during the last twelve years about four
millions of peasants from European Russia have been successfully settled in
Siberia.
Even in the European portion of the Empire millions of acres which are
at present unproductive might be utilised. Any one who has travelled by rail
from Berlin to St. Petersburg must have noticed how the landscape
suddenly changes its character as soon as he has crossed the frontier.
Leaving a prosperous agricultural country, he traverses for many weary
hours a region in which there is hardly a sign of human habitation, though
the soil and climate of that region resembles closely the soil and climate of
East Prussia. The difference lies in the amount of labour and capital
expended. According to official statistics the area of European Russia
contains, roughly speaking, 406 millions of dessyatins, of which 78
millions, or 19 per cent., are classified as neudobniya, unfit for cultivation;
157 millions, or 39 per cent., as forest; 106 millions, or 26 per cent., as

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arable land; and 65 millions, or 16 per cent., as pasturage. Thus the arable
and pasture land compose only 42 per cent., or considerably less than half
the area.
Of the land classed as unfit for cultivation—19 per cent. of the whole—a
large portion, including the perennially frozen tundri of the far north, must
ever remain unproductive, but in latitudes with a milder climate this
category of land is for the most part ordinary morass or swamp, which can
be transformed into pasturage, or even into arable land, by drainage at a
moderate cost. As a proof of this statement I may cite the draining of the
great Pinsk swamps, which was begun by the Government in 1872. If we
may trust an official report of the progress of the works in 1897, an area of
2,855,000 dessyatins (more than seven and a half million acres) had been
drained at an average cost of about three shillings an acre, and the price of
land had risen from four to twenty-eight roubles per dessyatin.
Reclamation of marshes might be undertaken elsewhere on a much more
moderate scale. The observant traveller on the highways and byways of the
northern provinces must have noticed on the banks of almost every stream
many acres of marshy land producing merely reeds or coarse rank grass that
no well-brought-up animal would look at. With a little elementary
knowledge of engineering and the expenditure of a moderate amount of
manual labour these marshes might be converted into excellent pasture or
even into highly productive kitchen-gardens; but the peasants have not yet
learned to take advantage of such opportunities, and the reformers, who
deal only in large projects and scientific panaceas for the cure of
impoverishment, consider such trifles as unworthy of their attention. The
Scotch proverb that if the pennies be well looked after, the pounds will look
after themselves, contains a bit of homely wisdom totally unknown to the
Russian educated classes.
After the morasses, swamps, and marshes come the forests, constituting
39 per cent. of the whole area, and the question naturally arises whether
some portions of them might not be advantageously transformed into
pasturage or arable land. In the south and east they have been diminished to
such an extent as to affect the climate injuriously, so that the area of them
should be increased rather than lessened; but in the northern provinces the
vast expanses of forest, covering millions of acres, might perhaps be
curtailed with advantage. The proprietors prefer, however, to keep them in

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their present condition because they give a modest revenue without any
expenditure of capital.
Therein lies the great obstacle to land-reclamation in Russia: it requires
an outlay of capital, and capital is extremely scarce in the Empire of the
Tsars. Until it becomes more plentiful, the area of arable land and pasturage
is not likely to be largely increased, and other means of checking the
impoverishment of the peasantry must be adopted.
A less expensive means is suggested by the statistics of foreign trade. In
the preceding chapter we have seen that from 1860 to 1900 the average
annual export of grain rose steadily from under 1 1/2 millions to over 6
millions of tons. It is evident, therefore, that in the food supply, so far from
there being a deficiency, there has been a large and constantly increasing
surplus. If the peasantry have been on short rations, it is not because the
quantity of food produced has fallen short of the requirements of the
population, but because it has been unequally distributed. The truth is that
the large landed proprietors produce more and the peasants less than they
consume, and it has naturally occurred to many people that the present state
of things might be improved if a portion of the arable land passed, without
any socialistic, revolutionary measures, from the one class to the other. This
operation began spontaneously soon after the Emancipation. Well-to-do
peasants who had saved a little money bought from the proprietors bits of
land near their villages and cultivated them in addition to their allotments.
At first this extension of peasant land was confined within very narrow
limits, because the peasants had very little capital at their disposal, but in
1882 the Government came to their aid by creating the Peasant Land Bank,
the object of which was to advance money to purchasers of the peasant
class on the security of the land purchased, at the rate of 7 1/2 per cent.,
including sinking fund.* From that moment the purchases increased rapidly.
They were made by individual peasants, by rural Communes, and, most of
all, by small voluntary associations composed of three, four, or more
members. In the course of twenty years (1883-1903) the Bank made 47,791
advances, and in this way were purchased about eighteen million acres.
This sounds a very big acquisition, but it will not do much to relieve the
pressure on the peasantry as a whole, because it adds only about 6 per cent.
to the amount they already possessed in virtue of the Emancipation Law.

* This arrangement extinguishes the debt in 34 1/2 years; an

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additional 1 per cent, extinguishes it in 24 1/2 years. By
recent legislation other arrangements are permitted.

Nearly all of this land purchased by the peasantry comes directly or
indirectly from the Noblesse, and much more will doubtless pass from the
one class to the other if the Government continues to encourage the
operation; but already symptoms of a change of policy are apparent. In the
higher official regions it is whispered that the existing policy is
objectionable from the political point of view, and one sometimes hears the
question asked: Is it right and desirable that the Noblesse, who have ever
done their duty in serving faithfully the Tsar and Fatherland, and who have
ever been the representatives of civilisation and culture in Russian country
life, should be gradually expropriated in favour of other and less cultivated
social classes? Not a few influential personages are of opinion that such a
change is unjust and undesirable, and they argue that it is not advantageous
to the peasants themselves, because the price of land has risen much more
than the rents. It is not at all uncommon, for example, to find that land can
be rented at five roubles per dessyatin, whereas it cannot be bought under
200 roubles. In that case the peasant can enjoy the use of the land at the
moderate rate of 2 1/2 per cent. of the capital value, whereas by purchasing
the land with the assistance of the bank he would have to pay, without
sinking fund, more than double that rate. The muzhik, however, prefers to
be owner of the land, even at a considerable sacrifice. When he can be
induced to give his reasons, they are usually formulated thus: "With my
own land I can do as I like; if I hire land from the neighbouring proprietor,
who knows whether, at the end of the term, he may not raise the rent or
refuse to renew the contract at any price?"
Even if the Government should continue to encourage the purchase of
land by the peasantry, the process is too slow to meet all the requirements of
the situation. Some additional expedient must be found, and we naturally
look for it in the experience of older countries with a denser population.
In the more densely populated countries of Western Europe a safety-
valve for the inordinate increase of the rural population has been provided
by the development of manufacturing industry. High wages and the
attractions of town life draw the rural population to the industrial centres,
and the movement has increased to such an extent that already complaints
are heard of the rural districts becoming depopulated. In Russia a similar
movement is taking place on a smaller scale. During the last forty years,

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under the fostering influence of a protective tariff, the manufacturing
industry has made gigantic strides, as we shall see in a future chapter, and it
has already absorbed about two millions of the redundant hands in the
villages; but it cannot keep pace with the rapid increasing surplus. Two
millions are less than two per cent. of the population. The great mass of the
people has always been, and must long continue to be, purely agricultural;
and it is to their fields that they must look for the means of subsistence. If
the fields do not supply enough for their support under the existing
primitive methods of cultivation, better methods must be adopted. To use a
favourite semi-scientific phrase, Russia has now reached the point in her
economic development at which she must abandon her traditional extensive
system of agriculture and adopt a more intensive system. So far all
competent authorities are agreed. But how is the transition, which requires
technical knowledge, a spirit of enterprise, an enormous capital, and a
dozen other things which the peasantry do not at present possess, to be
effected? Here begin the well-marked differences of opinion.
Hitherto the momentous problem has been dealt with chiefly by the
theorists and doctrinaires who delight in radical solutions by means of
panaceas, and who have little taste for detailed local investigation and
gradual improvement. I do not refer to the so-called "Saviours of the
Fatherland" (Spasiteli Otetchestva), well-meaning cranks and visionaries
who discover ingenious devices for making their native country at once
prosperous and happy. I speak of the great majority of reasonable, educated
men who devote some attention to the problem. Their favourite method of
dealing with it is this: The intensive system of agriculture requires scientific
knowledge and a higher level of intellectual culture. What has to be done,
therefore, is to create agricultural colleges supplied with all the newest
appliances of agronomic research and to educate the peasantry to such an
extent that they may be able to use the means which science recommends.
For many years this doctrine prevailed in the Press, among the reading
public, and even in the official world. The Government was accordingly
urged to improve and multiply the agronomic colleges and the schools of all
grades and descriptions. Learned dissertations were published on the
chemical constitution of the various soils, the action of the atmosphere on
the different ingredients, the necessity of making careful meteorological
observations, and numerous other topics of a similar kind; and would-be
reformers who had no taste for such highly technical researches could

Page 536

console themselves with the idea that they were advancing the vital interests
of the country by discussing the relative merits of Communal and personal
land-tenure—deciding generally in favour of the former as more in
accordance with the peculiarities of Russian, as contrasted with West
European, principles of economic and social development.
While much valuable time and energy were thus being expended to little
purpose, on the assumption that the old system might be left untouched
until the preparations for a radical solution had been completed,
disagreeable facts which could not be entirely overlooked gradually
produced in influential quarters the conviction that the question was much
more urgent than was commonly supposed. A sensitive chord in the heart of
the Government was struck by the steadily increasing arrears of taxation,
and spasmodic attempts have since been made to cure the evil.
In the local administration, too, the urgency of the question has come to
be recognised, and measures are now being taken by the Zemstvo to help
the peasantry in making gradually the transition to that higher system of
agriculture which is the only means of permanently saving them from
starvation. For this purpose, in many districts well-trained specialists have
been appointed to study the local conditions and to recommend to the
villagers such simple improvements as are within their means. These
improvements may be classified under the following heads:
(1) Increase of the cereal crops by better seed and improved implements.
(2) Change in the rotation of crops by the introduction of certain grasses
and roots which improve the soil and supply food for live stock.
(3) Improvement and increase of live stock, so as to get more labour-
power, more manure, more dairy-produce, and more meat.
(4) Increased cultivation of vegetables and fruit.
With these objects in view the Zemstvo is establishing depots in which
improved implements and better seed are sold at moderate prices, and the
payments are made in installments, so that even the poorer members of the
community can take advantage of the facilities offered. Bulls and stallions
are kept at central points for the purpose of improving the breed of cattle
and horses, and the good results are already visible. Elementary instruction
in farming and gardening is being introduced into the primary schools. In
some districts the exertions of the Zemstvo are supplemented by small
agricultural societies, mutual credit associations, and village banks, and

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these are to some extent assisted by the Central Government. But the
beneficent action in this direction is not all official. Many proprietors
deserve great praise for the good influence which they exercise on the
peasants of their neighbourhood and the assistance they give them; and it
must be admitted that their patience is often sorely tried, for the peasants
have the obstinacy of ignorance, and possess other qualities which are not
sympathetic. I know one excellent proprietor who began his civilising
efforts by giving to the Mir of the nearest village an iron plough as a model
and a fine pedigree ram as a producer, and who found, on returning from a
tour abroad, that during his absence the plough had been sold for vodka,
and the pedigree ram had been eaten before it had time to produce any
descendants! In spite of this he continues his efforts, and not altogether
without success.
It need hardly be said that the progress of the peasantry is not so rapid as
could be wished. The muzhik is naturally conservative, and is ever inclined
to regard novelties with suspicion. Even when he is half convinced of the
utility of some change, he has still to think about it for a long time and talk
it over again and again with his friends and neighbours, and this preparatory
stage of progress may last for years. Unless he happens to be a man of
unusual intelligence and energy, it is only when he sees with his own eyes
that some humble individual of his own condition in life has actually gained
by abandoning the old routine and taking to new courses, that he makes up
his mind to take the plunge himself. Still, he is beginning to jog on. E pur si
muove! A spirit of progress is beginning to move on the face of the long-
stagnant waters, and progress once begun is pretty sure to continue with
increasing rapidity. With starvation hovering in the rear, even the most
conservative are not likely to stop or turn back.

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CHAPTER XXXII
THE ZEMSTVO AND THE LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT

Necessity of Reorganising the Provincial Administration—Zemstvo
Created in 1864—My First Acquaintance with the Institution—District and
Provincial Assemblies—The Leading Members—Great Expectations
Created by the Institution—These Expectations Not Realised—Suspicions
and Hostility of the Bureaucracy—Zemstvo Brought More Under Control
of the Centralised Administration—What It Has Really Done—Why It Has
Not Done More—-Rapid Increase of the Rates—How Far the Expenditure
Is Judicious—Why the Impoverishment of the Peasantry Was Neglected—
Unpractical, Pedantic Spirit—Evil Consequences—Chinese and Russian
Formalism—Local Self-Government of Russia Contrasted with That of
England—Zemstvo Better than Its Predecessors—Its Future.
After the emancipation of the serfs the reform most urgently required was
the improvement of the provincial administration. In the time of serfage the
Emperor Nicholas, referring to the landed proprietors, used to say in a
jocular tone that he had in his Empire 50,000 most zealous and efficient
hereditary police-masters. By the Emancipation Law the authority of these
hereditary police-masters was for ever abolished, and it became urgently
necessary to put something else in its place. Peasant self-government was
accordingly organised on the basis of the rural Commune; but it fell far
short of meeting the requirements of the situation. Its largest unit was the
Volost, which comprises merely a few contiguous Communes, and its action
is confined exclusively to the peasantry. Evidently it was necessary to
create a larger administrative unit, in which the interests of all classes of the
population could be attended to, and for this purpose Alexander II. in
November, 1859, more than a year before the Emancipation Edict,
instructed a special Commission to prepare a project for giving to the
inefficient, dislocated provincial administration greater unity and
independence. The project was duly prepared, and after being discussed in
the Council of State it received the Imperial sanction in January, 1864. It
was supposed to give, in the words of an explanatory memorandum

Page 539

attached to it, "as far as possible a complete and logical development to the
principle of local self-government." Thus was created the Zemstvo,* which
has recently attracted considerable attention in Western Europe, and which
is destined, perhaps, to play a great political part in the future.

* The term Zemstvo is derived from the word Zemlya, meaning
land, and might be translated, if a barbarism were
permissible, by Land-dom on the analogy of Kingdom, Dukedom,
etc.

My personal acquaintance with this interesting institution dates from
1870. Very soon after my arrival at Novgorod in that year, I made the
acquaintance of a gentleman who was described to me as "the president of
the provincial Zemstvo-bureau," and finding him amiable and
communicative, I suggested that he might give me some information
regarding the institution of which he was the chief local representative.
With the utmost readiness he proposed to be my Mentor, introduced me to
his colleagues, and invited me to come and see him at his office as often as
I felt inclined. Of this invitation I made abundant use. At first my visits
were discreetly few and short, but when I found that my new friend and his
colleagues really wished to instruct me in all the details of Zemstvo
administration, and had arranged a special table in the president's room for
my convenience, I became a regular attendant, and spent daily several hours
in the bureau, studying the current affairs, and noting down the interesting
bits of statistical and other information which came before the members, as
if I had been one of their number. When they went to inspect the hospital,
the lunatic asylum, the seminary for the preparation of village
schoolmasters, or any other Zemstvo institution, they invariably invited me
to accompany them, and made no attempt to conceal from me the defects
which they happened to discover.
I mention all this because it illustrates the readiness of most Russians to
afford every possible facility to a foreigner who wishes seriously to study
their country. They believe that they have long been misunderstood and
systematically calumniated by foreigners, and they are extremely desirous
that the prevalent misconceptions regarding their country should be
removed. It must be said to their honour that they have little or none of that
false patriotism which seeks to conceal national defects; and in judging
themselves and their institutions they are inclined to be over-severe rather
than unduly lenient. In the time of Nicholas I. those who desired to stand

Page 540

well with the Government proclaimed loudly that they lived in the happiest
and best-governed country of the world, but this shallow official optimism
has long since gone out of fashion. During all the years which I spent in
Russia I found everywhere the utmost readiness to assist me in my
investigations, and very rarely noticed that habit of "throwing dust in the
eyes of foreigners," of which some writers have spoken so much.
The Zemstvo is a kind of local administration which supplements the
action of the rural Communes, and takes cognizance of those higher public
wants which individual Communes cannot possibly satisfy. Its principal
duties are to keep the roads and bridges in proper repair, to provide means
of conveyance for the rural police and other officials, to look after primary
education and sanitary affairs, to watch the state of the crops and take
measures against approaching famine, and, in short, to undertake, within
certain clearly defined limits, whatever seems likely to increase the material
and moral well-being of the population. In form the institution is
Parliamentary—that is to say, it consists of an assembly of deputies which
meets regularly once a year, and of a permanent executive bureau elected by
the Assembly from among its members. If the Assembly be regarded as a
local Parliament, the bureau corresponds to the Cabinet. In accordance with
this analogy my friend the president was sometimes jocularly termed the
Prime Minister. Once every three years the deputies are elected in certain
fixed proportions by the landed proprietors, the rural Communes, and the
municipal corporations. Every province (guberniya) and each of the
districts (uyezdi) into which the province is subdivided has such an
assembly and such a bureau.
Not long after my arrival in Novgorod I had the opportunity of being
present at a District Assembly. In the ball-room of the "Club de la
Noblesse" I found thirty or forty men seated round a long table covered
with green cloth. Before each member lay sheets of paper for the purpose of
taking notes, and before the president—the Marshal of Noblesse for the
district—stood a small hand-bell, which he rang vigorously at the
commencement of the proceedings and on all the occasions when he wished
to obtain silence. To the right and left of the president sat the members of
the executive bureau (uprava), armed with piles of written and printed
documents, from which they read long and tedious extracts, till the majority
of the audience took to yawning and one or two of the members positively
went to sleep. At the close of each of these reports the president rang his

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bell—presumably for the purpose of awakening the sleepers—and inquired
whether any one had remarks to make on what had just been read.
Generally some one had remarks to make, and not unfrequently a
discussion ensued. When any decided difference of opinion appeared a vote
was taken by handing round a sheet of paper, or by the simpler method of
requesting the Ayes to stand up and the Noes to sit still.
What surprised me most in this assembly was that it was composed partly
of nobles and partly of peasants—the latter being decidedly in the majority
—and that no trace of antagonism seemed to exist between the two classes.
Landed proprietors and their ci-devant serfs, emancipated only ten years
before, evidently met for the moment on a footing of equality. The
discussions were carried on chiefly by the nobles, but on more than one
occasion peasant members rose to speak, and their remarks, always clear,
practical, and to the point, were invariably listened to with respectful
attention. Instead of that violent antagonism which might have been
expected, considering the constitution of the Assembly, there was too much
unanimity—a fact indicating plainly that the majority of the members did
not take a very deep interest in the matters presented to them.
This assembly was held in the month of September. At the beginning of
December the Assembly for the Province met, and during nearly three
weeks I was daily present at its deliberations. In general character and mode
of procedure it resembled closely the District Assembly. Its chief
peculiarities were that its members were chosen, not by the primary
electors, but by the assemblies of the ten districts which compose the
province, and that it took cognisance merely of those matters which
concerned more than one district. Besides this, the peasant deputies were
very few in number—a fact which somewhat surprised me, because I was
aware that, according to the law, the peasant members of the District
Assemblies were eligible, like those of the other classes. The explanation is
that the District Assemblies choose their most active members to represent
them in the Provincial Assemblies, and consequently the choice generally
falls on landed proprietors. To this arrangement the peasants make no
objection, for attendance at the Provincial Assemblies demands a
considerable pecuniary outlay, and payment to the deputies is expressly
prohibited by law.

Page 542

To give the reader an idea of the elements composing this assembly, let
me introduce him to a few of the members. A considerable section of them
may be described in a single sentence. They are commonplace men, who
have spent part of their youth in the public service as officers in the army, or
officials in the civil administration, and have since retired to their estates,
where they gain a modest competence by farming. Some of them add to
their agricultural revenue by acting as justices of the peace.* A few may be
described more particularly.

* That is no longer possible. The institution of justices
elected and paid by the Zemstvo was abolished in 1889.

You see there, for instance, that fine-looking old general in uniform, with
the St. George's Cross at his button-hole—an order given only for bravery
in the field. That is Prince Suvorof, a grandson of the famous general. He
has filled high posts in the Administration without ever tarnishing his name
by a dishonest or dishonourable action, and has spent a great part of his life
at Court without ceasing to be frank, generous, and truthful. Though he has
no intimate knowledge of current affairs, and sometimes gives way a little
to drowsiness, his sympathies in disputed points are always on the right
side, and when he gets to his feet he always speaks in a clear soldierlike
fashion.
The tall gaunt man, somewhat over middle age, who sits a little to the left
is Prince Vassiltchikof. He too, has an historic name, but he cherishes above
all things personal independence, and has consequently always kept aloof
from the Imperial Administration and the Court. The leisure thus acquired
he has devoted to study, and he has produced several valuable works on
political and social science. An enthusiastic but at the same time cool-
headed abolitionist at the time of the Emancipation, he has since constantly
striven to ameliorate the condition of the peasantry by advocating the
spread of primary education, the rural credit associations in the village, the
preservation of the Communal institutions, and numerous important reforms
in the financial system. Both of these gentlemen, it is said, generously gave
to their peasants more land than they were obliged to give by the
Emancipation Law. In the Assembly Prince Vassiltchikof speaks frequently,
and always commands attention; and in all important committees he is
leading member. Though a warm defender of the Zemstvo institutions, he
thinks that their activity ought to be confined to a comparatively narrow

Page 543

field, and he thereby differs from some of his colleagues, who are ready to
embark in hazardous, not to say fanciful, schemes for developing the
natural resources of the province. His neighbour, Mr. P——, is one of the
ablest and most energetic members of the Assembly. He is president of the
executive bureau in one of the districts, where he has founded many
primary schools and created several rural credit associations on the model
of those which bear the name of Schultze Delitsch in Germany. Mr. S——,
who sits beside him, was for some years an arbiter between the proprietors
and emancipated serfs, then a member of the Provincial Executive Bureau,
and is now director of a bank in St. Petersburg.
To the right and left of the president—who is Marshal of Noblesse for the
province—sit the members of the bureau. The gentleman who reads the
long reports is my friend "the Prime Minister," who began life as a cavalry
officer, and after a few years of military service retired to his estate; he is an
intelligent, able administrator, and a man of considerable literary culture.
His colleague, who assists him in reading the reports, is a merchant, and
director of the municipal bank. The next member is also a merchant, and in
some respects the most remarkable man in the room. Though born a serf, he
is already, at middle age, an important personage in the Russian commercial
world. Rumour says that he laid the foundation of his fortune by one day
purchasing a copper cauldron in a village through which he was passing on
his way to St. Petersburg, where he hoped to gain a little money by the sale
of some calves. In the course of a few years he amassed an enormous
fortune; but cautious people think that he is too fond of hazardous
speculations, and prophesy that he will end life as poor as he began it.
All these men belong to what may be called the party of progress, which
anxiously supports all proposals recognised as "liberal," and especially all
measures likely to improve the condition of the peasantry. Their chief
opponent is that little man with close-cropped, bullet-shaped head and small
piercing eyes, who may be called the Leader of the opposition. He
condemns many of the proposed schemes, on the ground that the province
is already overtaxed, and that the expenditure ought to be reduced to the
smallest possible figure. In the District Assembly he preaches this doctrine
with considerable success, for there the peasantry form the majority, and he
knows how to use that terse, homely language, interspersed with proverbs,
which has far more influence on the rustic mind than scientific principles
and logical reasoning; but here, in Provincial Assembly, his following

Page 544

composes only a respectable minority, and he confines himself to a policy
of obstruction.
The Zemstvo of Novgorod had at that time the reputation of being one of
the most enlightened and energetic, and I must say that the proceedings
were conducted in a business-like, satisfactory way. The reports were
carefully considered, and each article of the annual budget was submitted to
minute scrutiny and criticism. In several of the provinces which I
afterwards visited I found that affairs were conducted in a very different
fashion: quorums were formed with extreme difficulty, and the proceedings,
when they at last commenced, were treated as mere formalities and
despatched as speedily as possible. The character of the Assembly depends
of course on the amount of interest taken in local public affairs. In some
districts this interest is considerable; in others it is very near zero.
The birth of this new institution was hailed with enthusiasm, and
produced great expectations. At that time a large section of the Russian
educated classes had a simple, convenient criterion for institutions of all
kinds. They assumed as a self-evident axiom that the excellence of an
institution must always be in proportion to its "liberal" and democratic
character. The question as to how far it might be appropriate to the existing
conditions and to the character of the people, and as to whether it might not,
though admirable in itself, be too expensive for the work to be performed,
was little thought of. Any organisation which rested on "the elective
principle," and provided an arena for free public discussion, was sure to be
well received, and these conditions were fulfilled by the Zemstvo.
The expectations excited were of various kinds. People who thought
more of political than economic progress saw in the Zemstvo the basis of
boundless popular liberty. Prince Yassiltchikof, for example, though
naturally of a phlegmatic temperament, became for a moment enthusiastic,
and penned the following words: "With a daring unparalleled in the
chronicles of the world, we have entered on the career of public life." If
local self-government in England had, in spite of its aristocratic character,
created and preserved political liberty, as had been proved by several
learned Germans, what might be expected from institutions so much more
liberal and democratic? In England there had never been county
parliaments, and the local administration had always been in the hands of
the great land-owners; whilst in Russia every district would have its elective

Page 545

assembly, in which the peasant would be on a level with the richest landed
proprietors. People who were accustomed to think of social rather than
political progress expected that they would soon see the country provided
with good roads, safe bridges, numerous village schools, well-appointed
hospitals, and all the other requisites of civilisation. Agriculture would
become more scientific, trade and industry would be rapidly developed, and
the material, intellectual, and moral condition of the peasantry would be
enormously improved. The listless apathy of provincial life and the
hereditary indifference to local public affairs were now, it was thought,
about to be dispelled; and in view of this change, patriotic mothers took
their children to the annual assemblies in order to accustom them from their
early years to take an interest in the public welfare.
It is hardly necessary to say that these inordinate expectations were not
realised. From the very beginning there had been a misunderstanding
regarding the character and functions of the new institutions. During the
short period of universal enthusiasm for reform the great officials had used
incautiously some of the vague liberal phrases then in fashion, but they
never seriously intended to confer on the child which they were bringing
into the world a share in the general government of the country; and the
rapid evaporation of their sentimental liberalism, which began as soon as
they undertook practical reforms, made them less and less conciliatory.
When the vigorous young child, therefore, showed a natural desire to go
beyond the humble functions accorded to it, the stern parents proceeded to
snub it and put it into its proper place. The first reprimand was administered
publicly in the capital. The St. Petersburg Provincial Assembly, having
shown a desire to play a political part, was promptly closed by the Minister
of the Interior, and some of the members were exiled for a time to their
homes in the country.
This warning produced merely a momentary effect. As the functions of
the Imperial Administration and of the Zemstvo had never been clearly
defined, and as each was inclined to extend the sphere of its activity,
friction became frequent. The Zemstvo had the right, for example, to co-
operate in the development of education, but as soon as it organised primary
schools and seminaries it came into contact with the Ministry of Public
Instruction. In other departments similar conflicts occurred, and the
tchinovniks came to suspect that the Zemstvo had the ambition to play the
part of a parliamentary Opposition. This suspicion found formal expression

Page 546

in at least one secret official document, in which the writer declares that
"the Opposition has built itself firmly a nest in the Zemstvo." Now, if we
mean to be just to both parties in this little family quarrel, we must admit
that the Zemstvo, as I shall explain in a future chapter, had ambitions of that
kind, and it would have been better perhaps for the country at the present
moment if it had been able to realise them. But this is a West-European
idea. In Russia there is, and can be, no such thing as "His Majesty's
Opposition." To the Russian official mind the three words seem to contain a
logical contradiction. Opposition to officials, even within the limits of the
law, is equivalent to opposition to the Autocratic Power, of which they are
the incarnate emanations; and opposition to what they consider the interests
of autocracy comes within measurable distance of high treason. It was
considered necessary, therefore, to curb and suppress the ambitious
tendencies of the wayward child, and accordingly it was placed more and
more under the tutelage of the provincial Governors. To show how the
change was effected, let me give an illustration. In the older arrangements
the Governor could suspend the action of the Zemstvo only on the ground
of its being illegal or ultra vires, and when there was an irreconcilable
difference of opinion between the two parties the question was decided
judicially by the Senate; under the more recent arrangements his Excellency
can interpose his veto whenever he considers that a decision, though it may
be perfectly legal, is not conducive to the public good, and differences of
opinion are referred, not to the Senate, but to the Minister of the Interior,
who is always naturally disposed to support the views of his subordinate.
In order to put an end to all this insubordination, Count Tolstoy, the
reactionary Minister of the Interior, prepared a scheme of reorganisation in
accordance with his anti-liberal views, but he died before he could carry it
out, and a much milder reorganisation was adopted in the law of 12th (24th)
June, 1890. The principal changes introduced by that law were that the
number of delegates in the Assemblies was reduced by about a fourth, and
the relative strength of the different social classes was altered. Under the
old law the Noblesse had about 42 per cent., and the peasantry about 38 per
cent, of the seats; by the new electoral arrangements the former have 57 per
cent, and the latter about 30. It does not necessarily follow, however, that
the Assemblies are more conservative or more subservient on that account.
Liberalism and insubordination are much more likely to be found among
the nobles than among the peasants.

Page 547

In addition to all this, as there was an apprehension in the higher official
spheres of St. Petersburg that the opposition spirit of the Zemstvo might
find public expression in a printed form, the provincial Governors received
extensive rights of preventive censure with regard to the publication of the
minutes of Zemstvo Assemblies and similar documents.
What the bureaucracy, in its zeal to defend the integrity of the Autocratic
Power, feared most of all was combination for a common purpose on the
part of the Zemstvos of different provinces. It vetoed, therefore, all such
combinations, even for statistical purposes; and when it discovered, a few
years ago, that leading members of the Zemstvo from all parts of the
country were holding private meetings in Moscow for the ostensible
purpose of discussing economic questions, it ordered them to return to their
homes.
Even within its proper sphere, as defined by law, the Zemstvo has not
accomplished what was expected of it. The country has not been covered
with a network of macadamised roads, and the bridges are by no means as
safe as could be desired. Village schools and infirmaries are still far below
the requirements of the population. Little or nothing has been done for the
development of trade or manufactures; and the villages remain very much
what they were under the old Administration. Meanwhile the local rates
have been rising with alarming rapidity; and many people draw from all this
the conclusion that the Zemstvo is a worthless institution which has
increased the taxation without conferring any corresponding benefit on the
country.
If we take as our criterion in judging the institution the exaggerated
expectations at first entertained, we may feel inclined to agree with this
conclusion, but this is merely tantamount to saying that the Zemstvo has
performed no miracles. Russia is much poorer and much less densely
populated than the more advanced nations which she takes as her model. To
suppose that she could at once create for herself by means of an
administrative reform all the conveniences which those more advanced
nations enjoy, was as absurd as it would be to imagine that a poor man can
at once construct a magnificent palace because he has received from a
wealthy neighbour the necessary architectural plans. Not only years but
generations must pass before Russia can assume the appearance of
Germany, France, or England. The metamorphosis may be accelerated or

Page 548

retarded by good government, but it could not be effected at once, even if
the combined wisdom of all the philosophers and statesmen in Europe were
employed in legislating for the purpose.
The Zemstvo has, however, done much more than the majority of its
critics admit. It fulfils tolerably well, without scandalous peculation and
jobbery, its commonplace, every-day duties, and it has created a new and
more equitable system of rating, by which landed proprietors and house-
owners are made to bear their share of the public burdens. It has done a
very great deal to provide medical aid and primary education for the
common people, and it has improved wonderfully the condition of the
hospitals, lunatic asylums, and other benevolent institutions committed to
its charge. In its efforts to aid the peasantry it has helped to improve the
native breeds of horses and cattle, and it has created a system of obligatory
fire-insurance, together with means for preventing and extinguishing fires
in the villages—a most important matter in a country where the peasants
live in wooden houses and big fires are fearfully frequent. After neglecting
for a good many years the essential question as to how the peasants' means
of subsistence can be increased, it has latterly, as I have mentioned in a
foregoing chapter, helped them to obtain improved agricultural implements
and better seed, encouraged the formation of small credit associations and
savings banks, and appointed agricultural inspectors to teach them how they
may introduce modest improvements within their limited means.* At the
same time, in many districts it has endeavoured to assist the home industries
which are threatened with annihilation by the big factories, and whenever
measures have been proposed for the benefit of the rural population, such as
the lowering of the land-redemption payments and the creation of the
Peasant Land Bank, it has invariably given them its cordial support.

* The amount expended for these objects in 1897, the latest year
for which I have statistical data, was about a million and a half
of roubles, or, roughly speaking, 150,000 pounds, distributed under
the following heads:—1. Agricultural tuition
41,100 pounds.
2. Experimental stations, museums, etc 19,800
3. Scientific agriculturists 17,400
4. Agricultural industries 26,700
5. Improving breeds of horses and cattle 45,300
———-
150,300 pounds.

If you ask a zealous member of the Zemstvo why it has not done more he
will probably tell you that it is because its activity has been constantly

Page 549

restricted and counteracted by the Government. The Assemblies were
obliged to accept as presidents the Marshals of Noblesse, many of whom
were men of antiquated ideas and retrograde principles. At every turn the
more enlightened, more active members found themselves opposed,
thwarted, and finally checkmated by the Imperial officials. When a laudable
attempt was made to tax trade and industry more equitably the scheme was
vetoed, and consequently the mercantile class, sure of being always taxed at
a ridiculously low maximum, have lost all interest in the proceedings. Even
with regard to the rating of landed and house property a low limit is
imposed by the Government, because it is afraid that if the rates were raised
much it would not be able to collect the heavy Imperial taxation. The
uncontrolled publicity which was at first enjoyed by the Assemblies was
afterwards curtailed by the bureaucracy. Under such restrictions all free,
vigorous action became impossible, and the institutions failed to effect what
was reasonably anticipated.
All this is true in a certain sense, but it is not the whole truth. If we
examine some of the definite charges brought against the institution we
shall understand better its real character.
The most common complaint made against it is that it has enormously
increased the rates. On that point there is no possibility of dispute. At first
its expenditure in the thirty-four provinces in which it existed was under six
millions of roubles; in two years (1868) it had jumped up to fifteen
millions; in 1875 it was nearly twenty-eight millions, in 1885 over forty-
three millions, and at the end of the century it had attained the respectable
figure of 95,800,000 roubles. As each province had the right of taxing itself,
the increase varied greatly in different provinces. In Smolensk, for example,
it was only about thirty per cent., whilst in Samara it was 436, and in
Viatka, where the peasant element predominates, no less than 1,262 per
cent.! In order to meet this increase, the rates on land rose from under ten
millions in 1868 to over forty-seven millions in 1900. No wonder that the
landowners who find it difficult to work their estates at a profit should
complain!
Though this increase is disagreeable to the rate-payers, it does not follow
that it is excessive. In all countries rates and local taxation are on the
increase, and it is in the backward countries that they increase most rapidly.
In France, for example, the average yearly increase has been 2.7 per cent.,

Page 550

while in Austria it has been 5.59. In Russia it ought to have been more than
in Austria, whereas it has been, in the provinces with Zemstvo institutions,
only about 4 per cent. In comparison with the Imperial taxation the local
does not seem excessive when compared with other countries. In England
and Prussia, for instance, the State taxation as compared with the local is as
a hundred to fifty-four and fifty-one, whilst in Russia it is as a hundred to
sixteen.* A reduction in the taxation as a whole would certainly contribute
to the material welfare of the rural population, but it is desirable that it
should be made in the Imperial taxes rather than in the rates, because the
latter may be regarded as something akin to productive investments, whilst
the proceeds of the former are expended largely on objects which have little
or nothing to do with the wants of the common people. In speaking thus I
am assuming that the local expenditure is made judiciously, and this is a
matter on which, I am bound to confess, there is by no means unanimity of
opinion.

* These figures are taken from the best available
authorities, chiefly Schwanebach and Scalon, but I am not
prepared to guarantee their accuracy.

Hostile critics can point to facts which are, to say the least, strange and
anomalous. Out of the total of its revenue the Zemstvo spends about
twenty-eight per cent. under the heading of public health and benevolent
institutions; and about fifteen per cent. for popular education, whilst it
devotes only about six per cent. to roads and bridges, and until lately it
neglected, as I have said above, the means for improving agriculture and
directly increasing the income of the peasantry.
Before passing sentence with regard to these charges we must remember
the circumstances in which the Zemstvo was founded and has grown up. In
the early times its members were well-meaning men who had had very little
experience in administration or in practical life of any sort except the old
routine in which they had previously vegetated. Most of them had lived
enough in the country to know how much the peasants were in need of
medical assistance of the most elementary kind, and to this matter they at
once turned their attention. They tried to organise a system of doctors,
hospital assistants, and dispensaries by which the peasant would not have to
go more than fifteen or twenty miles to get a wound dressed or to have a
consultation or to obtain a simple remedy for ordinary ailments. They felt

Page 551

the necessity, too, of thoroughly reorganising the hospitals and the lunatic
asylums, which were in a very unsatisfactory condition. Plainly enough,
there was here good work to be done. Then there were the higher aims. In
the absence of practical experience there were enthusiasms and theories.
Amongst these was the enthusiasm for education, and the theory that the
want of it was the chief reason why Russia had remained so far behind the
nations of Western Europe. Give us education, it was said, and all other
good things will be added thereto. Liberate the Russian people from the
bonds of ignorance as you have liberated it from the bonds of serfage, and
its wonderful natural capacities will then be able to create everything that is
required for its material, intellectual, and moral welfare.
If there was any one among the leaders who took a more sober, prosaic
view of things he was denounced as an ignoramus and a reactionary.
Willingly or unwillingly, everybody had to swim with the current. Roads
and bridges were not entirely neglected, but the efforts in that direction
were confined to the absolutely indispensable. For such prosaic concerns
there was no enthusiasm, and it was universally recognised that in Russia
the construction of good roads, as the term is understood in Western
Europe, was far beyond the resources of any Administration. Of the
necessity for such roads few were conscious. All that was required was to
make it possible to get from one place to another in ordinary weather and
ordinary circumstances. If a stream was too deep to be forded, a bridge had
to be built or a ferry had to be established; and if the approach to a bridge
was so marshy or muddy that vehicles often sank quite up to the axles and
had to be dragged out by ropes, with the assistance of the neighbouring
villagers, repairs had to be made. Beyond this the efforts of the Zemstvo
rarely went. Its road-building ambition remained within very modest
bounds.
As for the impoverishment of the peasantry and the necessity of
improving their system of agriculture, that question had hardly appeared
above the horizon. It might have to be dealt with in the future, but there was
no need for hurry. Once the rural population were educated, the question
would solve itself. It was not till about the year 1885 that it was recognised
to be more urgent than had been supposed, and some Zemstvos perceived
that the people might starve before its preparatory education was
completed. Repeated famines pushed the lesson home, and the landed
proprietors found their revenues diminished by the fall in the price of grain

Page 552

on the European markets. Thus was raised the cry: "Agriculture in Russia is
on the decline! The country has entered on an acute economic crisis! If
energetic measures be not taken promptly the people will soon find
themselves confronted by starvation!"
To this cry of alarm the Zemstvo was neither deaf nor indifferent.
Recognising that the danger could be averted only by inducing the
peasantry to adopt a more intensive system of agriculture, it directed more
and more of its attention to agricultural improvements, and tried to get them
adopted.* It did, in short, all it could, according to its lights and within the
limits of its moderate resources. Its available resources were small,
unfortunately, for it was forbidden by the Government to increase the rates,
and it could not well dismiss doctors and close dispensaries and schools
when the people were clamouring for more. So at least the defenders of the
Zemstvo maintain, and they go so far as to contend that it did well not to
grapple with the impoverishment of the peasantry at an earlier period, when
the real conditions of the problem and the means of solving it were only
very imperfectly known: if it had begun at that time it would have made
great blunders and spent much money to little purpose.

* Vide supra, p. 489.

However this may be, it would certainly be unfair to condemn the
Zemstvo for not being greatly in advance of public opinion. If it endeavours
strenuously to supply all clearly recognised wants, that is all that can
reasonably be expected of it. What it may be more justly reproached with is,
in my opinion, that it is, to a certain extent, imbued with that unpractical,
pedantic spirit which is commonly supposed to reside exclusively in the
Imperial Administration. But here again it simply reflects public opinion
and certain intellectual peculiarities of the educated classes. When a
Russian begins to write on a simple everyday subject, he likes to connect it
with general principles, philosophy, or history, and begins, perhaps, by
expounding his views on the intellectual and social developments of
humanity in general and of Russia in particular. If he has sufficient space at
his disposal he may even tell you something about the early period of
Russian history previous to the Mongol invasion before he gets to the
simple matter in hand. In a previous chapter I have described the process of
"shedding on a subject the light of science" in Imperial legislation.* In
Zemstvo activity we often meet with pedantry of a similar kind.

Page 553

* Vide supra, p. 343.

If this pedantry were confined to the writing of Reports it might not do
much harm. Unfortunately, it often appears in the sphere of action. To
illustrate this I take a recent instance from the province of Nizhni-
Novgorod. The Zemstvo of that province received from the Central
Government in 1895 a certain amount of capital for road-improvement,
with instructions from the Ministry of Interior that it should classify the
roads according to their relative importance and improve them accordingly.
Any intelligent person well acquainted with the region might have made, in
the course of a week or two, the required classification accurately enough
for all practical purposes. Instead of adopting this simple procedure, what
does the Zemstvo do? It chooses one of the eleven districts of which the
province is composed and instructs its statistical department to describe all
the villages with a view of determining the amount of traffic which each
will probably contribute to the general movement, and then it verifies its a
priori conclusions by means of a detachment of specially selected
"registrars," posted at all the crossways during six days of each month.
These registrars doubtless inscribed every peasant cart as it passed and
made a rough estimate of the weight of its load. When this complicated and
expensive procedure was completed for one district it was applied to
another; but at the end of three years, before all the villages of this second
district had been described and the traffic estimated, the energy of the
statistical department seems to have flagged, and, like a young author
impatient to see himself in print, it published a volume at the public
expense which no one will ever read.
The cost entailed by this procedure is not known, but we may form some
idea of the amount of time required for the whole operation. It is a simple
rule-of-three sum. If it took three years for the preparatory investigation of a
district and a half, how many years will be required for eleven districts?
More than twenty years! During that period it would seem that the roads are
to remain as they are, and when the moment comes for improving them it
will be found that, unless the province is condemned to economic
stagnation, the "valuable statistical material" collected at such an
expenditure of time and money is in great part antiquated and useless. The
statistical department will be compelled, therefore, like another unfortunate
Sisyphus, to begin the work anew, and it is difficult to see how the

Page 554

Zemstvo, unless it becomes a little more practical, is ever to get out of the
vicious circle.
In this case the evil result of pedantry was simply unnecessary delay, and
in the meantime the capital was accumulating, unless the interest was
entirely swallowed up by the statistical researches; but there are cases in
which the consequences are more serious. Let me take an illustration from
the enlightened province of Moscow. It was observed that certain villages
were particularly unhealthy, and it was pointed out by a local doctor that the
inhabitants were in the habit of using for domestic purposes the water of
ponds which were in a filthy condition. What was evidently wanted was
good wells, and a practical man would at once have taken measures to have
them dug. Not so the District Zemstvo. It at once transformed the simple
fact into a "question" requiring scientific investigation. A commission was
appointed to study the problem, and after much deliberation it was decided
to make a geological survey in order to ascertain the depth of good water
throughout the district as a preparatory step towards preparing a project
which will some day be discussed in the District Assembly, and perhaps in
the Assembly of the province. Whilst all this is being done according to the
strict principles of bureaucratic procedure, the unfortunate peasants for
whose benefit the investigation was undertaken continue to drink the
muddy water of the dirty ponds.
Incidents of that kind, which I might multiply almost to any extent,
remind one of the proverbial formalism of the Chinese; but between
Chinese and Russian pedantry there is an essential difference. In the Middle
Kingdom the sacrifice of practical considerations proceeds from an
exaggerated veneration of the wisdom of ancestors; in the Empire of the
Tsars it is due to an exaggerated adoration of the goddess Nauka (Science)
and a habit of appealing to abstract principles and scientific methods when
only a little plain common-sense is required.
On one occasion, I remember, in a District Assembly of the province of
Riazan, when the subject of primary schools was being discussed, an
influential member started up, and proposed that an obligatory system of
education should at once be introduced throughout the whole district.
Strange to say, the motion was very nearly carried, though all the members
present knew—or at least might have known if they had taken the trouble to
inquire—that the actual number of schools would have to be multiplied

Page 555

twenty-fold, and all were agreed that the local rates must not be increased.
To preserve his reputation for liberalism, the honourable member further
proposed that, though the system should be obligatory, no fines,
punishments, or other means of compulsion should be employed. How a
system could be obligatory without using some means of compulsion, he
did not condescend to explain. To get out of the difficulty one of his
supporters suggested that the peasants who did not send their children to
school should be excluded from serving as office-bearers in the Communes;
but this proposition merely created a laugh, for many deputies knew that the
peasants would regard this supposed punishment as a valuable privilege.
And whilst this discussion about the necessity of introducing an ideal
system of obligatory education was being carried on, the street before the
windows of the room was covered with a stratum of mud nearly two feet in
depth! The other streets were in a similar condition; and a large number of
the members always arrived late, because it was almost impossible to come
on foot, and there was only one public conveyance in the town. Many
members had, fortunately, their private conveyances, but even in these
locomotion was by no means easy. One day, in the principal thoroughfare, a
member had his tarantass overturned, and he himself was thrown into the
mud!
It is hardly fair to compare the Zemstvo with the older institutions of a
similar kind in Western Europe, and especially with our own local self-
government. Our institutions have all grown out of real, practical wants
keenly felt by a large section of the population. Cautious and conservative
in all that concerns the public welfare, we regard change as a necessary evil,
and put off the evil day as long as possible, even when convinced that it
must inevitably come. Thus our administrative wants are always in advance
of our means of satisfying them, and we use vigorously those means as
soon as they are supplied. Our method of supplying the means, too, is
peculiar. Instead of making a tabula rasa, and beginning from the
foundations, we utilise to the utmost what we happen to possess, and add
merely what is absolutely indispensable. Metaphorically speaking, we
repair and extend our political edifice according to the changing necessities
of our mode of life, without paying much attention to abstract principles or
the contingencies of the distant future. The building may be an aesthetic
monstrosity, belonging to no recognised style of architecture, and built in
defiance of the principles laid down by philosophical art critics, but it is

Page 556

well adapted to our requirements, and every hole and corner of it is sure to
be utilised.
Very different has been the political history of Russia during the last two
centuries. It may be briefly described as a series of revolutions effected
peaceably by the Autocratic Power. Each young energetic sovereign has
attempted to inaugurate a new epoch by thoroughly remodelling the
Administration according to the most approved foreign political philosophy
of the time. Institutions have not been allowed to grow spontaneously out of
popular wants, but have been invented by bureaucratic theorists to satisfy
wants of which the people were still unconscious. The administrative
machine has therefore derived little or no motive force from the people, and
has always been kept in motion by the unaided energy of the Central
Government. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the
repeated attempts of the Government to lighten the burdens of centralised
administration by creating organs of local self-government should not have
been very successful.
The Zemstvo, it is true, offered better chances of success than any of its
predecessors. A large portion of the nobles had become alive to the
necessity of improving the administration, and the popular interest in public
affairs was much greater than at any former period. Hence there was at first
a period of enthusiasm, during which great preparations were made for
future activity, and not a little was actually effected. The institution had all
the charm of novelty, and the members felt that the eyes of the public were
upon them. For a time all went well, and the Zemstvo was so well pleased
with its own activity that the satirical journals compared it to Narcissus
admiring his image reflected in the pool. But when the charm of novelty
had passed and the public turned its attention to other matters, the
spasmodic energy evaporated, and many of the most active members looked
about for more lucrative employment. Such employment was easily found,
for at that time there was an unusual demand for able, energetic, educated
men. Several branches of the civil service were being reorganised, and
railways, banks, and joint-stock companies were being rapidly multiplied.
With these the Zemstvo had great difficulty in competing. It could not, like
the Imperial service, offer pensions, decorations, and prospects of
promotion, nor could it pay such large salaries as the commercial and
industrial enterprises. In consequence of all this, the quality of the executive

Page 557

bureaux deteriorated at the same time as the public interest in the institution
diminished.
To be just to the Zemstvo, I must add that, with all its defects and errors,
it is infinitely better than the institutions which it replaced. If we compare it
with previous attempts to create local self-government, we must admit that
the Russians have made great progress in their political education. What its
future may be I do not venture to predict. From its infancy it has had, as we
have seen, the ambition to play a great political part, and at the beginning of
the recent stirring times in St. Petersburg its leading representatives in
conclave assembled took upon themselves to express what they considered
the national demand for liberal representative institutions. The desire, which
had previously from time to time been expressed timidly and vaguely in
loyal addresses to the Tsar, that a central Zemstvo Assembly, bearing the
ancient title of Zemski Sobor, should be convoked in the capital and
endowed with political functions, was now put forward by the
representatives in plain unvarnished form. Whether this desire is destined to
be realised time will show.

Page 558

CHAPTER XXXIII
THE NEW LAW COURTS

Judicial Procedure in the Olden Times—Defects and Abuses—Radical
Reform—The New System—Justices of the Peace and Monthly Sessions—
The Regular Tribunals—Court of Revision—Modification of the Original
Plan—How Does the System Work?—Rapid Acclimatisation—The Bench
—The Jury—Acquittal of Criminals Who Confess Their Crimes—Peasants,
Merchants, and Nobles as Jurymen—Independence and Political
Significance of the New Courts.
After serf-emancipation and local self-government, the subject which
demanded most urgently the attention of reformers was the judicial
organisation, which had sunk to a depth of inefficiency and corruption
difficult to describe.
In early times the dispensation of justice in Russia, as in other States of a
primitive type, had a thoroughly popular character. The State was still in its
infancy, and the duty of defending the person, the property, and the rights of
individuals lay, of necessity, chiefly on the individuals themselves. Self-
help formed the basis of the judicial procedure, and the State merely
assisted the individual to protect his rights and to avenge himself on those
who voluntarily infringed them.
By the rapid development of the Autocratic Power all this was changed.
Autocracy endeavoured to drive and regulate the social machine by its own
unaided force, and regarded with suspicion and jealousy all spontaneous
action in the people. The dispensation of justice was accordingly
appropriated by the central authority, absorbed into the Administration, and
withdrawn from public control. Themis retired from the market-place, shut
herself up in a dark room from which the contending parties and the public
gaze were rigorously excluded, surrounded herself with secretaries and
scribes who put the rights and claims of the litigants into whatever form
they thought proper, weighed according to her own judgment the arguments
presented to her by her own servants, and came forth from her seclusion

Page 559

merely to present a ready-made decision or to punish the accused whom she
considered guilty.
This change, though perhaps to some extent necessary, was attended with
very bad consequences. Freed from the control of the contending parties
and of the public, the courts acted as uncontrolled human nature generally
does. Injustice, extortion, bribery, and corruption assumed gigantic
proportions, and against these evils the Government found no better remedy
than a system of complicated formalities and ingenious checks. The judicial
functionaries were hedged in by a multitude of regulations, so numerous
and complicated that it seemed impossible for even the most unjust judge to
swerve from the path of uprightness. Explicit, minute rules were laid down
for investigating facts and weighing evidence; every scrap of evidence and
every legal ground on which the decision was based were committed to
writing; every act in the complicated process of coming to a decision was
made the subject of a formal document, and duly entered in various
registers; every document and register had to be signed and countersigned
by various officials who were supposed to control each other; every
decision might be carried to a higher court and made to pass a second time
through the bureaucratic machine. In a word, the legislature introduced a
system of formal written procedure of the most complicated kind, in the
belief that by this means mistakes and dishonesty would be rendered
impossible.
It may be reasonably doubted whether this system of judicial
administration can anywhere give satisfactory results. It is everywhere
found by experience that in tribunals from which the healthy atmosphere of
publicity is excluded justice languishes, and a great many ugly plants shoot
up with wonderful vitality. Languid indifference, an indiscriminating spirit
of routine, and unblushing dishonesty invariably creep in through the little
chinks and crevices of the barrier raised against them, and no method of
hermetically sealing these chinks and crevices has yet been invented. The
attempt to close them up by increasing the formalities and multiplying the
courts of appeal and revision merely adds to the tediousness of the
procedure, and withdraws the whole process still more completely from
public control. At the same time the absence of free discussion between the
contending parties renders the task of the judge enormously difficult. If the
system is to succeed at all, it must provide a body of able, intelligent,

Page 560

thoroughly-trained jurists, and must place them beyond the reach of bribery
and other forms of corruption.
In Russia neither of these conditions was fulfilled. Instead of
endeavouring to create a body of well-trained jurists, the Government went
further and further in the direction of letting the judges be chosen for a short
period by popular election from among men who had never received a
juridical education, or a fair education of any kind; whilst the place of judge
was so poorly paid, and stood so low in public estimation, that the
temptations to dishonesty were difficult to resist.
The practice of choosing the judges by popular election was an attempt to
restore to the courts something of their old popular character; but it did not
succeed, for very obvious reasons. Popular election in a judicial
organisation is useful only when the courts are public and the procedure
simple; on the contrary, it is positively prejudicial when the procedure is in
writing and extremely complicated. And so it proved in Russia. The elected
judges, unprepared for their work, and liable to be changed at short
intervals, rarely acquired a knowledge of law or procedure. They were for
the most part poor, indolent landed proprietors, who did little more than
sign the decisions prepared for them by the permanent officials. Even when
a judge happened to have some legal knowledge he found small scope for
its application, for he rarely, if ever, examined personally the materials out
of which a decision was to be elaborated. The whole of the preliminary
work, which was in reality the most important, was performed by minor
officials under the direction of the secretary of the court. In criminal cases,
for instance, the secretary examined the written evidence—all evidence was
taken down in writing—extracted what he considered the essential points,
arranged them as he thought proper, quoted the laws which ought in his
opinion to be applied, put all this into a report, and read the report to the
judges. Of course the judges, if they had no personal interest in the
decision, accepted the secretary's view of the case. If they did not, all the
preliminary work had to be done anew by themselves—a task that few
judges were able, and still fewer willing, to perform. Thus the decision lay
virtually in the hands of the secretary and the minor officials, and in general
neither the secretary nor the minor officials were fit persons to have such
power. There is no need to detail here the ingenious expedients by which
they increased their meagre salaries, and how they generally contrived to
extract money from both parties.* Suffice it to say that in general the

Page 561

chancelleries of the courts were dens of pettifogging rascality, and the
habitual, unblushing bribery had a negative as well as a positive effect. If a
person accused of some crime had no money wherewith to grease the palm
of the secretary he might remain in prison for years without being brought
to trial. A well-known Russian writer still living relates that when visiting a
prison in the province of Nizhni-Novgorod he found among the inmates
undergoing preliminary arrest two peasant women, who were accused of
setting fire to a hayrick to revenge themselves on a landed proprietor, a
crime for which the legal punishment was from four to eight months'
imprisonment. One of them had a son of seven years of age, and the other a
son of twelve, both of whom had been born in the prison, and had lived
there ever since among the criminals. Such a long preliminary arrest caused
no surprise or indignation among those who heard of it, because it was quite
a common occurrence. Every one knew that bribes were taken not only by
the secretary and his scribes, but also by the judges, who were elected by
the local Noblesse from its own ranks.

* Old book-catalogues sometimes mention a play bearing the
significant title, "The Unheard-of Wonder; or, The Honest
Secretary" (Neslykhannoe Dyelo ili Tchestny Sekretar). I
have never seen this curious production, but I have no doubt
that it referred to the peculiarities of the old judicial
procedure.

With regard to the scale of punishments, notwithstanding some
humanitarian principles in the legislation, they were very severe, and
corporal punishment played amongst them a disagreeably prominent part.
Capital sentences were abolished as early as 1753-54, but castigation with
the knout, which often ended fatally, continued until 1845, when it was
replaced by flogging in the civil administration, though retained for the
military and for insubordinate convicts. For the non-privileged classes the
knout or the lash supplemented nearly all punishments of a criminal kind.
When a man was condemned, for example, to penal servitude, he received
publicly from thirty to one hundred lashes, and was then branded on the
forehead and cheeks with the letters K. A. T.—the first three letters of
katorzhnik (convict). If he appealed he received his lashes all the same, and
if his appeal was rejected by the Senate he received some more castigation
for having troubled unnecessarily the higher judicial authorities. For the
military and insubordinate convicts there was a barbarous punishment

Page 562

called Spitsruten, to the extent of 5,000 or 6,000 blows, which often ended
in the death of the unfortunate.
The use of torture in criminal investigations was formally abolished in
1801, but if we may believe the testimony of a public prosecutor, it was
occasionally used in Moscow as late as 1850.
The defects and abuses of the old system were so flagrant that they
became known even to the Emperor Nicholas I., and caused him
momentary indignation, but he never attempted seriously to root them out.
In 1844, for example, he heard of some gross abuses in a tribunal not far
from the Winter Palace, and ordered an investigation. Baron Korff, to whom
the investigation was entrusted, brought to light what he called "a yawning
abyss of all possible horrors, which have been accumulating for years," and
his Majesty, after reading the report, wrote upon it with his own hand:
"Unheard-of disgrace! The carelessness of the authority immediately
concerned is incredible and unpardonable. I feel ashamed and sad that such
disorder could exist almost under my eyes and remain unknown to me."
Unfortunately the outburst of Imperial indignation did not last long enough
to produce any desirable consequences. The only result was that one
member of the tribunal was dismissed from the service, and the Governor-
General of St. Petersburg had to resign, but the latter subsequently received
an honorary reward, and the Emperor remarked that he was himself to
blame for having kept the Governor-General so long at his post.
When his Majesty's habitual optimism happened to be troubled by
incidents of this sort he probably consoled himself with remembering that
he had ordered some preparatory work, by which the administration of
justice might be improved, and this work was being diligently carried out in
the legislative section of his own chancery by Count Bludof, one of the
ablest Russian lawyers of his time. Unfortunately the existing state of things
was not thereby improved, because the preparatory work was not of the
kind that was wanted. On the assumption that any evil which might exist
could be removed by improving the laws, Count Bludof devoted his efforts
almost entirely to codification. In reality what was required was to change
radically the organisation of the courts and the procedure, and above all to
let in on their proceedings the cleansing atmosphere of publicity. This the
Emperor Nicholas could not understand, and if he had understood it he
could not have brought himself to adopt the appropriate remedies, because

Page 563

radical reform and control of officials by public opinion were his two pet
bugbears.
Very different was his son and successor, Alexander II., in the first years
of his reign. In his accession manifesto a prominent place was given to his
desire that justice and mercy should reign in the courts of law. Referring to
these words in a later manifesto, he explained his wishes more fully as "the
desire to establish in Russia expeditious, just, merciful, impartial courts of
justice for all our subjects; to raise the judicial authority; to give it the
proper independence, and in general to implant in the people that respect for
the law which ought to be the constant guide of all and every one from the
highest to the lowest." These were not mere vain words. Peremptory orders
had been given that the great work should be undertaken without delay, and
when the Emancipation question was being discussed in the Provincial
Committees, the Council of State examined the question of judicial reform
"from the historical, the theoretical, and the practical point of view," and
came to the conclusion that the existing organisation must be completely
transformed.
The commission appointed to consider this important matter filed a
lengthy indictment against the existing system, and pointed out no less than
twenty-five radical defects. To remove these it proposed that the judicial
organisation should be completely separated from all other branches of the
Administration; that the most ample publicity, with trial by jury in criminal
cases, should be introduced into the tribunals; that Justice of Peace Courts
should be created for petty affairs; and that the procedure in the ordinary
courts should be greatly simplified.
These fundamental principles were published by Imperial command on
September 29th, 1862—a year and a half after the publication of the
Emancipation Manifesto—and on November 20th, 1864, the new
legislation founded on these principles received the Imperial sanction.
Like most institutions erected on a tabula rasa, the new system is at once
simple and symmetrical. As a whole, the architecture of the edifice is
decidedly French, but here and there we may detect unmistakable
symptoms of English influence. It is not, however, a servile copy of any
older edifice; and it may be fairly said that, though every individual part has
been fashioned according to a foreign model, the whole has a certain
originality.

Page 564

The lower part of the building in its original form was composed of two
great sections, distinct from, and independent of, each other—on the one
hand the Justice of Peace Courts, and on the other the Regular Tribunals.
Both sections contained an Ordinary Court and a Court of Appeal. The
upper part of the building, covering equally both sections, was the Senate as
Supreme Court of Revision (Cour de Cassation).
The distinctive character of the two independent sections may be
detected at a glance. The function of the Justice of Peace Courts is to decide
petty cases that involve no abstruse legal principles, and to settle, if possible
by conciliation, those petty conflicts and disputes which arise naturally in
the relations of everyday life; the function of the Regular Tribunals is to
take cognisance of those graver affairs in which the fortune or honour of
individuals or families is more or less implicated, or in which the public
tranquillity is seriously endangered. The two kinds of courts were organised
in accordance with these intended functions. In the former the procedure is
simple and conciliatory, the jurisdiction is confined to cases of little
importance, and the judges were at first chosen by popular election,
generally from among the local inhabitants. In the latter there is more of
"the pomp and majesty of the law." The procedure is more strict and formal,
the jurisdiction is unlimited with regard to the importance of the cases, and
the judges are trained jurists nominated by the Emperor.
The Justice of Peace Courts received jurisdiction over all obligations and
civil injuries in which the sum at stake was not more than 500 roubles—
about 50 pounds—and all criminal affairs in which the legal punishment did
not exceed 300 roubles—about 30 pounds—or one year of punishment.
When any one had a complaint to make, he might go to the Justice of the
Peace (Mirovoi Sudya) and explain the affair orally, or in writing, without
observing any formalities; and if the complaint seemed well founded, the
Justice at once fixed a day for hearing the case, and gave the other party
notice to appear at the appointed time. When the time appointed arrived, the
affair was discussed publicly and orally, either by the parties themselves, or
by any representatives whom they might appoint. If it was a civil suit, the
Justice began by proposing to the parties to terminate it at once by a
compromise, and indicated what he considered a fair arrangement. Many
affairs were terminated in this simple way. If, however, either of the parties
refused to consent to a compromise, the matter was fully discussed, and the
Justice gave a formal written decision, containing the grounds on which it

Page 565

was based. In criminal cases the amount of punishment was always
determined by reference to a special Criminal Code.
If the sum at issue exceeded thirty roubles—about 3 pounds—or if the
punishment exceeded a fine of fifteen roubles—about 30s.—or three days
of arrest, an appeal might be made to the Assembly of Justices (Mirovoi
Syezd). This is a point in which English rather than French institutions were
taken as a model. According to the French system, all appeals from a Juge
de Paix are made to the "Tribunal d'Arrondissement," and the Justice of
Peace Courts are thereby subordinated to the Regular Tribunals. According
to the English system, certain cases may be carried on appeal from the
Justice of the Peace to the Quarter Sessions. This latter principle was
adopted and greatly developed by the Russian legislation. The Monthly
Sessions, composed of all the Justices of the District (uyezd), considered
appeals against the decisions of the individual Justices. The procedure was
simple and informal, as in the lower court, but an assistant of the Procureur
was always present. This functionary gave his opinion in some civil and in
all criminal cases immediately after the debate, and the Court took his
opinion into consideration in framing its judgment.
In the other great section of the judicial organisation—the Regular
Tribunals—there are likewise Ordinary Courts and Courts of Appeal, called
respectively "Tribunaux d'Arrondissement" (Okruzhniye Sudy) and "Palais
de Justice" (Sudebniya Palaty). Each Ordinary Court has jurisdiction over
several Districts (uyezdy), and the jurisdiction of each Court of Appeals
comprehends several Provinces. All civil cases are subject to appeal,
however small the sum at stake may be, but criminal cases are decided
FINALLY by the lower court with the aid of a jury. Thus in criminal affairs
the "Palais de Justice" is not at all a court of appeal, but as no regular
criminal prosecution can be raised without its formal consent, it controls in
some measure the action of the lower courts.
As the general reader cannot be supposed to take an interest in the details
of civil procedure, I shall merely say on this subject that in both sections of
the Regular Tribunals the cases are always tried by at least three judges, the
sittings are public, and oral debates by officially recognised advocates form
an important part of the proceedings. I venture, however, to speak a little
more at length regarding the change which has been made in the criminal

Page 566

procedure—a subject that is less technical and more interesting for the
uninitiated.
Down to the time of the recent judicial reforms the procedure in criminal
cases was secret and inquisitorial. The accused had little opportunity of
defending himself, but, on the other hand, the State took endless formal
precautions against condemning the innocent. The practical consequence of
this system was that an innocent man might remain for years in prison until
the authorities convinced themselves of his innocence, whilst a clever
criminal might indefinitely postpone his condemnation.
In studying the history of criminal procedure in foreign countries, those
who were entrusted with the task of preparing projects of reform found that
nearly every country of Europe had experienced the evils from which
Russia was suffering, and that one country after another had come to the
conviction that the most efficient means of removing these evils was to
replace the inquisitorial by litigious procedure, to give a fair field and no
favour to the prosecutor and the accused, and allow them to fight out their
battle with whatever legal weapons they might think fit. Further, it was
discovered that, according to the most competent foreign authorities, it was
well in this modern form of judicial combat to leave the decision to a jury
of respectable citizens. The steps which Russia had to take were thus clearly
marked out by the experience of other nations, and it was decided that they
should be taken at once. The organs for the prosecution of supposed
criminals were carefully separated from the judges on the one hand, and
from the police on the other; oral discussions between the Public Prosecutor
and the prisoner's counsel, together with oral examination and cross-
questioning of witnesses, were introduced into the procedure; and the jury
was made an essential factor in criminal trials.
When a case, whether civil or criminal, has been decided in the Regular
Tribunals, there is no possibility of appeal in the strict sense of the term, but
an application may be made for a revision of the case on the ground of
technical informality. To use the French terms, there cannot be appel, but
there may be cassation. If there has been any omission or transgression of
essential legal formalities, or if the Court has overstepped the bounds of its
legal authority, the injured party may make an application to have the case
revised and tried again.* This is not, according to French juridical
conceptions, an appeal. The Court of Revision** (Cour de Cassation) does

Page 567

not enter into the material facts of the case, but merely decides the question
as to whether the essential formalities have been duly observed, and as to
whether the law has been properly interpreted and applied; and if it be
found on examination that there is some ground for invalidating the
decision, it does not decide the case. According to the new Russian system,
the sole Court of Revision is the Senate.

* This is the procedure referred to by Karl Karl'itch, vide
supra, p 37.

** I am quite aware that the term "Court of Revision" is
equivocal, but I have no better term to propose, and I hope
the above explanations will prevent confusion.

The Senate thus forms the regulator of the whole judicial system, but its
action is merely regulative. It takes cognisance only of what is presented to
it, and supplies to the machine no motive power. If any of the lower courts
should work slowly or cease to work altogether, the Senate might remain
ignorant of the fact, and certainly could take no official notice of it. It was
considered necessary, therefore, to supplement the spontaneous vitality of
the lower courts, and for this purpose was created a special centralised
judicial administration, at the head of which was placed the Minister of
Justice. The Minister is "Procureur-General," and has subordinates in all the
courts. The primary function of this administration is to preserve the force
of the law, to detect and repair all infractions of judicial order, to defend the
interests of the State and of those persons who are officially recognised as
incapable of taking charge of their own affairs, and to act in criminal
matters as Public Prosecutor.
Viewed as a whole, and from a little distance, this grand judicial edifice
seems perfectly symmetrical, but a closer and more minute inspection
brings to light unmistakable indications of a change of plan during the
process of construction. Though the work lasted only about half-a-dozen
years, the style of the upper differs from the style of the lower parts,
precisely as in those Gothic cathedrals which grew up slowly during the
course of centuries. And there is nothing here that need surprise us, for a
considerable change took place in the opinions of the official world during
that short period. The reform was conceived at a time of uncritical
enthusiasm for advanced liberal ideas, of boundless faith in the dictates of
science, of unquestioning reliance on public spirit, public control, and
public honesty—a time in which it was believed that the public would

Page 568

spontaneously do everything necessary for the common weal, if it were
only freed from the administrative swaddling-clothes in which it had been
hitherto bound. Still smarting from the severe regime of Nicholas, men
thought more about protecting the rights of the individual than about
preserving public order, and under the influence of the socialistic ideas in
vogue malefactors were regarded as the unfortunate, involuntary victims of
social inequality and injustice.
Towards the end of the period in question all this had begun to change.
Many were beginning to perceive that liberty might easily turn to license,
that the spontaneous public energy was largely expended in empty words,
and that a certain amount of hierarchical discipline was necessary in order
to keep the public administration in motion. It was found, therefore, in
1864, that it was impossible to carry out to their ultimate consequences the
general principles laid down and published in 1862. Even in those parts of
the legislation which were actually put in force, it was found necessary to
make modifications in an indirect, covert way. Of these, one may be cited
by way of illustration. In 1860 criminal inquiries were taken out of the
hands of the police and transferred to Juges d'instruction (Sudebniye
Sledovateli), who were almost entirely independent of the Public
Prosecutor, and could not be removed unless condemned for some legal
transgression by a Regular Tribunal. This reform created at first much
rejoicing and great expectations, because it raised a barrier against the
tyranny of the police and against the arbitrary power of the higher officials.
But very soon the defects of the system became apparent. Many Juges
d'instruction, feeling themselves independent, and knowing that they would
not be prosecuted except for some flagrantly illegal act, gave way to
indolence, and spent their time in inactivity.* In such cases it was always
difficult, and sometimes impossible, to procure a condemnation—for
indolence must assume gigantic proportions in order to become a crime—
and the minister had to adopt the practice of appointing, without Imperial
confirmation, temporary Juges d'instruction whom he could remove at
pleasure.

* A flagrant case of this kind came under my own
observation.

It is unnecessary, however, to enter into these theoretical defects. The
important question for the general public is: How do the institutions work in

Page 569

the local conditions in which they are placed?
This is a question which has an interest not only for Russians, but for all
students of social science, for it tends to throw light on the difficult subject
as to how far institutions may be successfully transplanted to a foreign soil.
Many thinkers hold, and not without reason, that no institution can work
well unless it is the natural product of previous historical development.
Now we have here an opportunity of testing this theory by experience; we
have even what Bacon terms an experimentum crucis. This new judicial
system is an artificial creation constructed in accordance with principles
laid down by foreign jurists. All that the elaborators of the project said
about developing old institutions was mere talk. In reality they made a
tabula rasa of the existing organisation. If the introduction of public oral
procedure and trial by jury was a return to ancient customs, it was a return
to what had been long since forgotten by all except antiquarian specialists,
and no serious attempt was made to develop what actually existed. One
form, indeed, of oral procedure had been preserved in the Code, but it had
fallen completely into disuse, and seems to have been overlooked by the
elaborators of the new system.*

* I refer to the so-called Sud po forme established by an
ukaz of Peter the Great, in 1723. I was much astonished
when I accidentally stumbled upon it in the Code.

Having in general little confidence in institutions which spring ready-
made from the brains of autocratic legislators, I expected to find that this
new judicial organisation, which looks so well on paper, was well-nigh
worthless in reality. Observation, however, has not confirmed my
pessimistic expectations. On the contrary, I have found that these new
institutions, though they have not yet had time to strike deep root, and are
very far from being perfect even in the human sense of the term, work on
the whole remarkably well, and have already conferred immense benefit on
the country.
In the course of a few years the Justice of Peace Courts, which may
perhaps be called the newest part of the new institutions, became
thoroughly acclimatised, as if they had existed for generations. As soon as
they were opened they became extremely popular. In Moscow the
authorities had calculated that under the new system the number of cases
would be more than doubled, and that on an average each justice would

Page 570

have nearly a thousand cases brought before him in the course of the year.
The reality far exceeded their expectations: each justice had on an average
2,800 cases. In St. Petersburg and the other large towns the amount of work
which the justices had to get through was equally great.
To understand the popularity of the Justice of Peace Courts, we must
know something of the old police courts which they supplanted. The nobles,
the military, and the small officials had always looked on the police with
contempt, because their position secured them against interference, and the
merchants acquired a similar immunity by submitting to blackmail, which
often took the form of a fixed subsidy; but the lower classes in town and
country stood, in fear of the humblest policeman, and did not dare to
complain of him to his superiors. If two workmen brought their differences
before a police court, instead of getting their case decided on grounds of
equity, they were pretty sure to get scolded in language unfit for ears polite,
or to receive still worse treatment. Even among the higher officers of the
force many became famous for their brutality. A Gorodnitchi of the town of
Tcherkassy, for example, made for himself in this respect a considerable
reputation. If any humble individual ventured to offer an objection to him,
he had at once recourse to his fists, and any reference to the law put him
into a state of frenzy. "The town," he was wont to say on such occasions,
"has been entrusted to me by his Majesty, and you dare to talk to me of the
law? There is the law for you!"—the remark being accompanied with a
blow. Another officer of the same type, long resident in Kief, had a
somewhat different method of maintaining order. He habitually drove about
the town with a Cossack escort, and when any one of the lower classes had
the misfortune to displease him, he ordered one of his Cossacks to apply a
little corporal punishment on the spot without any legal formalities.
In the Justice of Peace Courts things were conducted in a very different
style. The justice, always scrupulously polite without distinction of persons,
listened patiently to the complaint, tried to arrange the affairs amicably, and
when his efforts failed, gave his decision at once according to law and
common-sense. No attention was paid to rank or social position. A general
who would not attend to the police regulations was fined like an ordinary
workingman, and in a dispute between a great dignitary and a man of the
people the two were treated in precisely the same way. No wonder such
courts became popular among the masses; and their popularity was
increased when it became known that the affairs were disposed of

Page 571

expeditiously, without unnecessary formalities and without any bribes or
blackmail. Many peasants regarded the justice as they had been wont to
regard kindly proprietors of the old patriarchal type, and brought their griefs
and sorrows to him in the hope that he would somehow alleviate them.
Often they submitted most intimate domestic and matrimonial concerns of
which no court could possibly take cognisance, and sometimes they
demanded the fulfilment of contracts which were in flagrant contradiction
not only with the written law, but also with ordinary morality.*

* Many curious instances of this have come to my knowledge,
but they are of such a kind that they cannot be quoted in a
work intended for the general public.

Of course, the courts were not entirely without blemishes. In the matter,
for example, of making no distinction of persons some of the early justices,
in seeking to avoid Scylla, came dangerously near to Charybdis. Imagining
that their mission was to eradicate the conceptions and habits which had
been created and fostered by serfage, they sometimes used their authority
for giving lessons in philanthropic liberalism, and took a malicious delight
in wounding the susceptibilities, and occasionally even the material
interests, of those whom they regarded as enemies to the good cause. In
disputes between master and servant, or between employer and workmen,
the justice of this type considered it his duty to resist the tyranny of capital,
and was apt to forget his official character of judge in his assumed character
of social reformer. Happily these aberrations on the part of the justices are
already things of the past, but they helped to bring about a reaction, as we
shall see presently.
The extreme popularity of the Justice of Peace Courts did not last very
long. Their history resembled that of the Zemstvo and many other new
institutions in Russia—at first, enthusiasm and inordinate expectations; then
consciousness of defects and practical inconveniences; and, lastly, in an
influential section of the public, the pessimism of shattered illusions,
accompanied by the adoption of a reactionary policy on the part of the
Government. The discontent appeared first among the so-called privileged
classes. To people who had all their lives enjoyed great social consideration
it seemed monstrous that they should be treated exactly in the same way as
the muzhik; and when a general who was accustomed to be addressed as
"Your Excellency," was accused of using abusive language to his cook, and

Page 572

found himself seated on the same bench with the menial, he naturally
supposed that the end of all things was at hand; or perhaps a great civil
official, who was accustomed to regard the police as created merely for the
lower classes, suddenly found himself, to his inexpressible astonishment,
fined for a contravention of police regulations! Naturally the justices were
accused of dangerous revolutionary tendencies, and when they happened to
bring to light some injustice on the part of the tchinovnik they were
severely condemned for undermining the prestige of the Imperial authority.
For a time the accusations provoked merely a smile or a caustic remark
among the Liberals, but about the middle of the eighties criticisms began to
appear even in the Liberal Press. No very grave allegations were made, but
defects in the system and miscarriages of justice were put forward and
severely commented upon. Occasionally it happened that a justice was
indolent, or that at the Sessions in a small country town it was impossible to
form a quorum on the appointed day. Overlooking the good features of the
institution and the good services rendered by it, the critics began to propose
partial reorganisation in the sense of greater control by central authorities. It
was suggested, for example, that the President of Sessions should be
appointed by the Government, that the justices should be subordinated to
the Regular Tribunals, and that the principle of election by the Zemstvo
should be abolished.
These complaints were not at all unwelcome to the Government, because
it had embarked on a reactionary policy, and in 1889 it suddenly granted to
the critics a great deal more than they desired. In the rural districts of
Central Russia the justices were replaced by the rural supervisors, of whom
I have spoken in a previous chapter, and the part of their functions which
could not well be entrusted to those new officials was transferred to judges
of the Regular Courts. In some of the larger towns and in the rural districts
of outlying provinces the justices were preserved, but instead of being
elected by the Zemstvo they were nominated by the Government.
The regular Tribunals likewise became acclimatised in an incredibly
short space of time. The first judges were not by any means profound
jurists, and were too often deficient in that dispassionate calmness which
we are accustomed to associate with the Bench; but they were at least
honest, educated men, and generally possessed a fair knowledge of the law.
Their defects were due to the fact that the demand for trained jurists far

Page 573

exceeded the supply, and the Government was forced to nominate men who
under ordinary circumstances would never have thought of presenting
themselves as candidates. At the beginning of 1870, in the 32 "Tribunaux
d'Arrondissement" which then existed, there were 227 judges, of whom 44
had never received a juridical education. Even the presidents had not all
passed through a school of law. Of course the courts could not become
thoroughly effective until all the judges were men who had received a good
special education and had a practical acquaintance with judicial matters.
This has now been effected, and the present generation of judges are better
prepared and more capable than their predecessors. On the score of probity
I have never heard any complaints.
Of all the judicial innovations, perhaps the most interesting is the jury.
At the time of the reforms the introduction of the jury into the judicial
organisation awakened among the educated classes a great amount of
sentimental enthusiasm. The institution had the reputation of being
"liberal," and was known to be approved of by the latest authorities in
criminal jurisprudence. This was sufficient to insure it a favourable
reception, and to excite most exaggerated expectations as to its beneficent
influence. Ten years of experience somewhat cooled this enthusiasm, and
voices might be heard declaring that the introduction of the jury was a
mistake. The Russian people, it was held, was not yet ripe for such an
institution, and numerous anecdotes were related in support of this opinion.
One jury, for instance, was said to have returned a verdict of "NOT guilty
with extenuating circumstances"; and another, being unable to come to a
decision, was reported to have cast lots before an Icon, and to have given a
verdict in accordance with the result! Besides this, juries often gave a
verdict of "not guilty" when the accused made a full and formal confession
to the court.
How far the comic anecdotes are true I do not undertake to decide, but I
venture to assert that such incidents, if they really occur, are too few to form
the basis of a serious indictment. The fact, however, that juries often acquit
prisoners who openly confess their crime is beyond all possibility of doubt.
To most Englishmen this fact will probably seem sufficient to prove that
the introduction of the institution was at least premature, but before
adopting this sweeping conclusion it will be well to examine the

Page 574

phenomenon a little more closely in connection with Russian criminal
procedure as a whole.
In England the Bench is allowed very great latitude in fixing the amount
of punishment. The jury can therefore confine themselves to the question of
fact and leave to the judge the appreciation of extenuating circumstances. In
Russia the position of the jury is different. The Russian criminal law fixes
minutely the punishment for each category of crimes, and leaves almost no
latitude to the judge. The jury know that if they give a verdict of guilty, the
prisoner will inevitably be punished according to the Code. Now the Code,
borrowed in great part from foreign legislation, is founded on conceptions
very different from those of the Russian people, and in many cases it
attaches heavy penalties to acts which the ordinary Russian is wont to
regard as mere peccadilloes, or positively justifiable. Even in those matters
in which the Code is in harmony with the popular morality, there are many
exceptional cases in which summum jus is really summa injuria. Suppose,
for instance—as actually happened in a case which came under my notice—
that a fire breaks out in a village, and that the Village Elder, driven out of
patience by the apathy and laziness of some of his young fellow-villagers,
oversteps the limits of his authority as defined by law, and accompanies his
reproaches and exhortations with a few lusty blows. Surely such a man is
not guilty of a very heinous crime—certainly he is not in the opinion of the
peasantry—and yet if he be prosecuted and convicted he inevitably falls
into the jaws of an article of the Code which condemns to transportation for
a long term of years.
In such cases what is the jury to do? In England they might safely give a
verdict of guilty, and leave the judge to take into consideration all the
extenuating circumstances; but in Russia they cannot act in this way, for
they know that the judge must condemn the prisoner according to the
Criminal Code. There remains, therefore, but one issue out of the difficulty
—a verdict of acquittal; and Russian juries—to their honour be it said—
generally adopt this alternative. Thus the jury, in those cases in which it is
most severely condemned, provides a corrective for the injustice of the
criminal legislation. Occasionally, it is true, they go a little too far in this
direction and arrogate to themselves a right of pardon, but cases of that kind
are, I believe, very rare. I know of only one well-authenticated instance.
The prisoner had been proved guilty of a serious crime, but it happened to
be the eve of a great religious festival, and the jury thought that in

Page 575

pardoning the prisoner and giving a verdict of acquittal they would be
acting as good Christians!
The legislation regards, of course, this practice as an abuse, and has tried
to prevent it by concealing as far as possible from the jury the punishment
that awaits the accused if he be condemned. For this purpose it forbids the
counsel for the prisoner to inform the jury what punishment is prescribed by
the Code for the crime in question. This ingenious device not only fails in
its object, but has sometimes a directly opposite effect. Not knowing what
the punishment will be, and fearing that it may be out of all proportion to
the crime, the jury sometimes acquit a criminal whom they would condemn
if they knew what punishment would be inflicted. And when a jury is, as it
were, entrapped, and finds that the punishment is more severe than it
supposed, it can take its revenge in the succeeding cases. I know at least of
one instance of this kind. A jury convicted a prisoner of an offence which it
regarded as very trivial, but which in reality entailed, according to the Code,
seven years of penal servitude! So surprised and frightened were the
jurymen by this unexpected consequence of their verdict, that they
obstinately acquitted, in the face of the most convincing evidence, all the
other prisoners brought before them.
The most famous case of acquital when there was no conceivable doubt
as to the guilt of the accused was that of Vera Zasulitch, who shot General
Trepof, Prefect of St. Petersburg; but the circumstances were so peculiar
that they will hardly support any general conclusion. I happened to be
present, and watched the proceedings closely. Vera Zasulitch, a young
woman who had for some time taken part in the revolutionary movement,
heard that a young revolutionist called Bogoliubof, imprisoned in St.
Petersburg, had been flogged by orders of General Trepof,* and though she
did not know the victim personally she determined to avenge the indignity
to which he had been subjected. With this intention she appeared at the
Prefecture, ostensibly for the purpose of presenting a petition, and when she
found herself in the presence of the Prefect she fired a revolver at him,
wounding him seriously, but not mortally. At the trial the main facts were
not disputed, and yet the jury brought in a verdict of not guilty. This
unexpected result was due, I believe, partly to a desire to make a little
political demonstration, and partly to a strong suspicion that the prison
authorities, in carrying out the Prefect's orders, had acted in summary
fashion without observing the tedious formalities prescribed by the law.

Page 576

Certainly one of the prison officials, when under cross-examination, made
on me, and on the public generally, the impression that he was prevaricating
in order to shield his superiors.

* The reason alleged by General Trepof for giving these
orders was that, during a visit of inspection, Bogoliubof
had behaved disrespectfully towards him, and had thereby
committed an infraction of prison discipline, for which the
law prescribes the use of corporal punishment.

At the close of the proceedings, which were dexterously conducted by
Counsel in such a way that, as the Emperor is reported to have said, it was
not Vera Zasulitch but General Trepof who was being tried, an eminent
Russian journalist rushed up to me in a state of intense excitement and said:
"Is not this a great day for the cause of political freedom in Russia?" I could
not agree with him and I ventured to predict that neither of us would ever
again see a political case tried publicly by jury in an ordinary court. The
prediction has proved true. Since that time political offenders have been
tried by special tribunals without a jury or dealt with "by administrative
procedure," that is to say, inquisitorially, without any regular trial.
The defects, real and supposed, of the present system are commonly
attributed to the predominance of the peasant element in the juries; and this
opinion, founded on a priori reasoning, seems to many too evident to
require verification. The peasantry are in many respects the most ignorant
class, and therefore, it is assumed, they are least capable of weighing
conflicting evidence. Plain and conclusive as this reasoning seems, it is in
my opinion erroneous. The peasants have, indeed, little education, but they
have a large fund of plain common-sense; and experience proves—so at
least I have been informed by many judges and Public Prosecutors—that, as
a general rule, a peasant jury is more to be relied on than a jury drawn from
the educated classes. It must be admitted, however, that a peasant jury has
certain peculiarities, and it is not a little interesting to observe what those
peculiarities are.
In the first place, a jury composed of peasants generally acts in a
somewhat patriarchal fashion, and does not always confine its attention to
the evidence and the arguments adduced at the trial. The members form
their judgment as men do in the affairs of ordinary life, and are sure to be
greatly influenced by any jurors who happen to be personally acquainted
with the prisoner. If several of the jurors know him to be a bad character, he

Page 577

has little chance of being acquitted, even though the chain of evidence
against him should not be quite perfect. Peasants cannot understand why a
notorious scoundrel should be allowed to escape because a little link in the
evidence is wanting, or because some little judicial formality has not been
duly observed. Indeed, their ideas of criminal procedure in general are
extremely primitive. The Communal method of dealing with malefactors is
best in accordance with their conceptions of well-regulated society. The Mir
may, by a Communal decree and without a formal trial, have any of its
unruly members transported to Siberia! This summary, informal mode of
procedure seems to the peasants very satisfactory. They are at a loss to
understand how a notorious culprit is allowed to "buy" an advocate to
defend him, and are very insensible to the bought advocate's eloquence. To
many of them, if I may trust to conversations which I have casually
overheard in and around the courts, "buying an advocate" seems to be very
much the same kind of operation as bribing a judge.
In the second place, the peasants, when acting as jurors, are very severe
with regard to crimes against property. In this they are instigated by the
simple instinct of self-defence. They are, in fact, continually at the mercy of
thieves and malefactors. They live in wooden houses easily set on fire; their
stables might be broken into by a child; at night the village is guarded
merely by an old man, who cannot be in more than one place at a time, and
in the one place he is apt to go to sleep; a police officer is rarely seen,
except when a crime has actually been committed. A few clever horse-
stealers may ruin many families, and a fire-raiser, in his desire to avenge
himself on an enemy, may reduce a whole village to destitution. These and
similar considerations tend to make the peasants very severe against theft,
robbery, and arson; and a Public Prosecutor who desires to obtain a
conviction against a man charged with one of these crimes endeavours to
have a jury in which the peasant class is largely represented.
With regard to fraud in its various forms, the peasants are much more
lenient, probably because the line of demarcation between honest and
dishonest dealing in commercial affairs is not very clearly drawn in their
minds. Many, for instance, are convinced that trade cannot be successfully
carried on without a little clever cheating; and hence cheating is regarded as
a venial offence. If the money fraudulently acquired be restored to the
owner, the crime is supposed to be completely condoned. Thus when a
Volost Elder appropriates the public money, and succeeds in repaying it

Page 578

before the case comes on for trial, he is invariably acquitted—and
sometimes even re-elected!
An equal leniency is generally shown by peasants towards crimes against
the person, such as assaults, cruelty, and the like. This fact is easily
explained. Refined sensitiveness and a keen sympathy with physical
suffering are the result of a certain amount of material well-being, together
with a certain degree of intellectual and moral culture, and neither of these
is yet possessed by the Russian peasantry. Any one who has had
opportunities of frequently observing the peasants must have been often
astonished by their indifference to suffering, both in their own persons and
in the person of others. In a drunken brawl heads may be broken and
wounds inflicted without any interference on the part of the spectators. If no
fatal consequences ensue, the peasant does not think it necessary that
official notice should be taken of the incident, and certainly does not
consider that any of the combatants should be transported to Siberia. Slight
wounds heal of their own accord without any serious loss to the sufferer,
and therefore the man who inflicts them is not to be put on the same level as
the criminal who reduces a family to beggary. This reasoning may, perhaps,
shock people of sensitive nerves, but it undeniably contains a certain
amount of plain, homely wisdom.
Of all kinds of cruelty, that which is perhaps most revolting to civilised
mankind is the cruelty of the husband towards his wife; but to this crime the
Russian peasant shows especial leniency. He is still influenced by the old
conceptions of the husband's rights, and by that low estimate of the weaker
sex which finds expression in many popular proverbs.
The peculiar moral conceptions reflected in these facts are evidently the
result of external conditions, and not of any recondite ethnographical
peculiarities, for they are not found among the merchants, who are nearly
all of peasant origin. On the contrary, the merchants are more severe with
regard to crimes against the person than with regard to crimes against
property. The explanation of this is simple. The merchant has means of
protecting his property, and if he should happen to suffer by theft, his
fortune is not likely to be seriously affected by it. On the other hand, he has
a certain sensitiveness with regard to such crimes as assault; for though he
has commonly not much more intellectual and moral culture than the

Page 579

peasant, he is accustomed to comfort and material well-being, which
naturally develop sensitiveness regarding physical pain.
Towards fraud the merchants are quite as lenient as the peasantry. This
may, perhaps, seem strange, for fraudulent practices are sure in the long run
to undermine trade. The Russian merchants, however, have not yet arrived
at this conception, and can point to many of the richest members of their
class as a proof that fraudulent practices often create enormous fortunes.
Long ago Samuel Butler justly remarked that we damn the sins we have no
mind to.
As the external conditions have little or no influence on the religious
conceptions of the merchants and the peasantry, the two classes are equally
severe with regard to those acts which are regarded as crimes against the
Deity. Hence acquittals in cases of sacrilege, blasphemy, and the like never
occur unless the jury is in part composed of educated men.
In their decisions, as in their ordinary modes of thought, the jurors drawn
from the educated classes are little, if at all, affected by theological
conceptions, but they are sometimes influenced in a not less unfortunate
way by conceptions of a different order. It may happen, for instance, that a
juror who had passed through one of the higher educational establishments
has his own peculiar theory about the value of evidence, or he is profoundly
impressed with the idea that it is better that a thousand guilty men should
escape than that one innocent man should be punished, or he is imbued with
sentimental pseudo-philanthropy, or he is convinced that punishments are
useless because they neither cure the delinquent nor deter others from
crime; in a word, he may have in some way or other lost his mental balance
in that moral chaos through which Russia is at present passing. In England,
France, or Germany such an individual would have little influence on his
fellow-jurymen, for in these countries there are very few people who allow
new paradoxical ideas to overturn their traditional notions and obscure their
common-sense; but in Russia, where even the elementary moral
conceptions are singularly unstable and pliable, a man of this type may
succeed in leading a jury. More than once I have heard men boast of having
induced their fellow-jurymen to acquit every prisoner brought before them,
not because they believed the prisoners to be innocent or the evidence to be
insufficient, but because all punishments are useless and barbarous.

Page 580

One word in conclusion regarding the independence and political
significance of the new courts. When the question of judicial reform was
first publicly raised many people hoped that the new courts would receive
complete autonomy and real independence, and would thus form a
foundation for political liberty. These hopes, like so many illusions of that
strange time, have not been realised. A large measure of autonomy and
independence was indeed granted in theory. The law laid down the principle
that no judge could be removed unless convicted of a definite crime, and
that the courts should present candidates for all the vacant places on the
Bench; but these and similar rights have little practical significance. If the
Minister cannot depose a judge, he can deprive him of all possibility of
receiving promotion, and he can easily force him in an indirect way to send
in his resignation; and if the courts have still the right to present candidates
for vacant places, the Minister has also this right, and can, of course, always
secure the nomination of his own candidate. By the influence of that
centripetal force which exists in all centralised bureaucracies, the
Procureurs have become more important personages than the Presidents of
the courts.
From the political point of view the question of the independence of the
Courts has not yet acquired much practical importance, because the
Government can always have political offenders tried by a special tribunal
or can send them to Siberia for an indefinite term of years without regular
trial by the "administrative procedure" to which I have above referred.

Page 581

Page 582

CHAPTER XXXIV
REVOLUTIONARY NIHILISM AND THE REACTION

The Reform-enthusiasm Becomes Unpractical and Culminates in
Nihilism—Nihilism, the Distorted Reflection of Academic Western
Socialism—Russia Well Prepared for Reception of Ultra-Socialist Virus—
Social Reorganisation According to Latest Results of Science—Positivist
Theory—Leniency of Press-censure—Chief Representatives of New
Movement—Government Becomes Alarmed—Repressive Measures—
Reaction in the Public—The Term Nihilist Invented—The Nihilist and His
Theory—Further Repressive Measures—Attitude of Landed Proprietors—
Foundation of a Liberal Party—Liberalism Checked by Polish Insurrection
—Practical Reform Continued—An Attempt at Regicide Forms a Turning-
point of Government's Policy—Change in Educational System—Decline of
Nihilism.
The rapidly increasing enthusiasm for reform did not confine itself to
practical measures such as the emancipation of the serfs, the creation of
local self-government, and the thorough reorganisation of the law-courts
and legal procedure. In the younger section of the educated classes, and
especially among the students of the universities and technical colleges, it
produced a feverish intellectual excitement and wild aspirations which
culminated in what is commonly known as Nihilism.
In a preceding chapter I pointed out that during the last two centuries all
the important intellectual movements in Western Europe have been
reflected in Russia, and that these reflections have generally been what may
fairly be termed exaggerated and distorted reproductions of the originals.*
Roughly speaking, the Nihilist movement in Russia may be described as the
exaggerated, distorted reflection of the earlier Socialist movements of the
West; but it has local peculiarities and local colouring which deserve
attention.

* See Chapter XXVI.

Page 583

The Russian educated classes had been well prepared by their past
history for the reception and rapid development of the Socialist virus. For a
century and a half the country had been subjected to a series of drastic
changes, administrative and social, by the energetic action of the Autocratic
Power, with little spontaneous co-operation on the part of the people. In a
nation with such a history, Socialistic ideas naturally found favour, because
all Socialist systems until quite recent times were founded on the
assumption that political and social progress must be the result not of slow
natural development, but rather of philosophic speculation, legislative
wisdom, and administrative energy.
This assumption lay at the bottom of the reform enthusiasm in St.
Petersburg at the commencement of Alexander II.'s reign. Russia might be
radically transformed, it was thought, politically and socially, according to
abstract scientific principles, in the space of a few years, and be thereby
raised to the level of West-European civilisation, or even higher. The older
nations had for centuries groped in darkness, or stumbled along in the faint
light of practical experience, and consequently their progress had been slow
and uncertain. For Russia there was no necessity to follow such devious,
unexplored paths. She ought to profit by the experience of her elder sisters,
and avoid the errors into which they had fallen. Nor was it difficult to
ascertain what these errors were, because they had been discovered,
examined and explained by the most eminent thinkers of France and
England, and efficient remedies had been prescribed. Russian reformers had
merely to study and apply the conclusions at which these eminent
authorities had arrived, and their task would be greatly facilitated by the
fact that they could operate on virgin soil, untrammelled by the feudal
traditions, religious superstitions, metaphysical conceptions, romantic
illusions, aristocratic prejudices, and similar obstacles to social and political
progress which existed in Western Europe.
Such was the extraordinary intellectual atmosphere in which the Russian
educated classes lived during the early years of the sixties. On the "men
with aspirations," who had longed in vain for more light and more public
activity under the obscurantist, repressive regime of the preceding reign, it
had an intoxicating effect. The more excitable and sanguine amongst them
now believed seriously that they had discovered a convenient short-cut to
national prosperity, and that for Russia a grandiose social and political
millennium was at hand.*

Page 584

* I was not myself in St. Petersburg at that period, but on
arriving a few years afterwards I became intimately
acquainted with men and women who had lived through it, and
who still retained much of their early enthusiasm.

In these circumstances it is not surprising that one of the most prominent
characteristics of the time was a boundless, child-like faith in the so-called
"latest results of science." Infallible science was supposed to have found the
solution of all political and social problems. What a reformer had to do—
and who was not a would-be reformer in those days?—was merely to study
the best authorities. Their works had been long rigidly excluded by the
Press censure, but now that it was possible to obtain them, they were read
with avidity. Chief among the new, infallible prophets whose works were
profoundly venerated was Auguste Comte, the inventor of Positivism. In his
classification of the sciences the crowning of the edifice was sociology,
which taught how to organise human society on scientific principles. Russia
had merely to adopt the principles laid down and expounded at great length
in the Cours de Philosophie Positive. There Comte explained that humanity
had to pass through three stages of intellectual development—the religious,
the metaphysical, and the positive—and that the most advanced nations,
after spending centuries in the two first, were entering on the third. Russia
must endeavour, therefore, to get into the positive stage as quickly as
possible, and there was reason to believe that, in consequence of certain
ethnographical and historical peculiarities, she could make the transition
more quickly than other nations. After Comte's works, the book which
found, for a time, most favour was Buckle's "History of Civilisation," which
seemed to reduce history and progress to a matter of statistics, and which
laid down the principle that progress is always in the inverse ratio of the
influence of theological conceptions. This principle was regarded as of
great practical importance, and the conclusion drawn from it was that rapid
national progress was certain if only the influence of religion and theology
could be destroyed. Very popular, too, was John Stuart Mill, because he was
"imbued with enthusiasm for humanity and female emancipation"; and in
his tract on Utilitarianism he showed that morality was simply the
crystallised experience of many generations as to what was most conducive
to the greatest good of the greatest number. The minor prophets of the time,
among whom Buchner occupied a prominent place, are too numerous to
mention.

Page 585

Strange to say, the newest and most advanced doctrines appeared
regularly, under a very thin and transparent veil, in the St. Petersburg daily
Press, and especially in the thick monthly magazines, which were as big as,
or bigger than, our venerable quarterlies. The art of writing and reading
"between the lines," not altogether unknown under the Draconian regime of
Nicholas I., was now developed to such a marvellous extent that almost any
thing could be written clearly enough to be understood by the initiated
without calling for the thunderbolts of the Press censors, which was now
only intermittently severe. Indeed, the Press censors themselves were
sometimes carried away by the reform enthusiasm. One of them long
afterwards related to me that during "the mad time," as he called it, in the
course of a single year he had received from his superiors no less than
seventeen reprimands for passing objectionable articles without remark.
The movement found its warmest partisans among the students and
young literary men, but not a few grey-beards were to be found among the
youthful apostles. All who read the periodical literature became more or
less imbued with the new spirit; but it must be presumed that many of those
who discoursed most eloquently had no clear idea of what they were talking
about; for even at a later date, when the novices had had time to acquaint
themselves with the doctrines they professed, I often encountered the most
astounding ignorance. Let me give one instance by way of illustration:
A young gentleman who was in the habit of talking glibly about the
necessity of scientifically reorganising human society, declared to me one
day that not only sociology, but also biology should be taken into
consideration. Confessing my complete ignorance of the latter science, I
requested him to enlighten me by giving me an instance of a biological
principle which could be applied to social regeneration. He looked
confused, and tried to ride out of the difficulty on vague general phrases;
but I persistently kept him to the point, and maliciously suggested that as an
alternative he might cite to me a biological principle which could NOT be
used for such a purpose. Again he failed, and it became evident to all
present that of biology, about which he talked so often, he knew absolutely
nothing but the name! After this I frequently employed the same pseudo-
Socratic method of discussion, and very often with a similar result. Not one
in fifty, perhaps, ever attempted to reduce the current hazy conceptions to a
concrete form. The enthusiasm was not the less intense, however, on that
account.

Page 586

At first the partisans of the movement seemed desirous of assisting,
rather than of opposing or undermining the Government, and so long as
they merely talked academically about scientific principles and similar
vague entities, the Government felt no necessity for energetic interference;
but as early as 1861 symptoms of a change in the character of the
movement became apparent. A secret society of officers organised a small
printing-press in the building of the Headquarters Staff and issued
clandestinely three numbers of a periodical called the Velikoruss (Great
Russian), which advocated administrative reform, the convocation of a
constituent assembly, and the emancipation of Poland from Russian rule. A
few months later (April, 1862) a seditious proclamation appeared,
professing to emanate from a central revolutionary committee, and
declaring that the Romanoffs must expiate with their blood the misery of
the people.
These symptoms of an underground revolutionary agitation caused alarm
in the official world, and repressive measures were at once adopted. Sunday
schools for the working classes, reading-rooms, students' clubs, and similar
institutions which might be used for purposes of revolutionary propaganda
were closed; several trials for political offences took place; the most
popular of the monthly periodicals (Sovremennik) was suspended, and its
editor, Tchernishevski, arrested. There was nothing to show that
Tchernishevski was implicated in any treasonable designs, but he was
undoubtedly the leader of a group of youthful writers whose aspirations
went far beyond the intentions of the Government, and it was thought
desirable to counteract his influence by shutting him up in prison. Here he
wrote and published, with the permission of the authorities and the
imprimatur of the Press censure, a novel called "Shto delat'?" ("What is to
be Done?"), which was regarded at first as a most harmless production, but
which is now considered one of the most influential and baneful works in
the whole range of Nihilist literature. As a novel it had no pretensions to
artistic merit, and in ordinary times it would have attracted little or no
attention, but it put into concrete shape many of the vague Socialist and
Communist notions that were at the moment floating about in the
intellectual atmosphere, and it came to be looked upon by the young
enthusiasts as a sort of informal manifesto of their new-born faith. It was
divided into two parts; in the first was described a group of students living
according to the new ideas in open defiance of traditional conventionalities,

Page 587

and in the second was depicted a village organised on the communistic
principles recommended by Fourier. The first was supposed to represent the
dawn of the new era; the second, the goal to be ultimately attained. When
the authorities discovered the mistake they had committed in allowing the
book to be published, it was at once confiscated and withdrawn from
circulation, whilst the author, after being tried by the Senate, was exiled to
Northeastern Siberia and kept there for nearly twenty years.*

* Tchernishevski was a man of encyclopaedic knowledge and
specially conversant with political economy. According to
the testimony of those who knew him intimately, he was one
of the ablest and most sympathetic men of his generation.
During his exile a bold attempt was made to rescue him, and
very nearly succeeded. A daring youth, disguised as an
officer of gendarmes and provided with forged official
papers, reached the place where he was confined and procured
his release, but the officer in charge had vague suspicions,
and insisted on the two travellers being escorted to the
next post-station by a couple of Cossacks. The rescuer
tried to get rid of the escort by means of his revolver, but
he failed in the attempt, and the fugitives were arrested.
In 1883 Tchernishevski was transferred to the milder climate
of Astrakhan, and in 1889 he was allowed to return to his
native town, Saratof, where he died a few months afterwards.

With the arrest and exile of Tchernishevski the young would-be reformers
were constrained to recognise that they had no chance of carrying the
Government with them in their endeavours to realise their patriotic
aspirations. Police supervision over the young generation was increased,
and all kinds of association, whether for mutual instruction, mutual aid, or
any other purpose, were discouraged or positively forbidden. And it was not
merely in the mind of the police that suspicion was aroused. In the opinion
of the great majority of moderate, respectable people the young enthusiasts
were becoming discredited. The violently seditious proclamations with
which they were supposed to sympathise, and a series of destructive fires in
St. Petersburg, erroneously attributed to them, frightened timid Liberals and
gave the Reactionaries, who had hitherto remained silent, an opportunity of
preaching their doctrines with telling effect. The celebrated novelist,
Turgeneif, long the idol of the young generation, had inadvertently in
"Fathers and Children" invented the term Nihilist, and it at once came to be
applied as an opprobrious epithet, notwithstanding the efforts of Pissaref, a
popular writer of remarkable talent, to prove to the public that it ought to be
regarded as a term of honour.

Page 588

Pissaref's attempt at rehabilitation made no impression outside of his own
small circle. According to popular opinion the Nihilists were a band of
fanatical young men and women, mostly medical students, who had
determined to turn the world upside down and to introduce a new kind of
social order, founded on the most advanced principles of social equality and
Communism. As a first step towards the great transformation they had
reversed the traditional order of things in the matter of coiffure: the males
allowed their hair to grow long, and the female adepts cut their hair short,
adding occasionally the additional badge of blue spectacles. Their unkempt
appearance naturally shocked the aesthetic feelings of ordinary people, but
to this they were indifferent. They had raised themselves above the level of
popular notions, took no account of so-called public opinion, gloried in
Bohemianism, despised Philistine respectability, and rather liked to
scandalise old-fashioned people imbued with antiquated prejudices.
This was the ridiculous side of the movement, but underneath the
absurdities there was something serious. These young men and women,
who were themselves terribly in earnest, were systematically hostile not
only to accepted conventionalities in the matter of dress, but to all manner
of shams, hypocrisy, and cant in the broad Carlylean sense of those terms.
To the "beautiful souls" of the older generation, who had habitually, in
conversation and literature, shed pathetic tears over the defects of Russian
social and political organisation without ever moving a finger to correct
them—especially the landed proprietors who talked and wrote about
civilisation, culture, and justice while living comfortably on the revenues
provided for them by their unfortunate serfs—these had the strongest
aversion; and this naturally led them to condemn in strong language the
worship of aesthetic culture. But here again they fell into exaggeration.
Professing extreme utilitarianism, they explained that the humble
shoemaker who practises his craft diligently is, in the true sense, a greater
man than a Shakespeare, or a Goethe, because humanity has more need of
shoes than of dramas and poetry.
Such silly paradoxes provoked, of course, merely a smile of compassion;
what alarmed the sensible, respectable "Philistine" was the method of
cleansing the Augean stable recommended by these enthusiasts. Having
discovered in the course of their desultory reading that most of the ills that
flesh is heir to proceed directly or indirectly from uncontrolled sexual
passion and the lust of gain, they proposed to seal hermetically these two

Page 589

great sources of crime and misery by abolishing the old-fashioned
institutions of marriage and private property. When society, they argued,
should be so organised that all the healthy instincts of human nature could
find complete and untrammelled satisfaction, there would be no motive or
inducement for committing crimes or misdemeanours. For thousands of
years humanity had been sailing on a wrong tack. The great law-givers of
the world, religious and civil, in their ignorance of physical science and
positivist methods, had created institutions, commonly known as law and
morality, which were utterly unfitted to human nature, and then the
magistrate and the moralist had endeavoured to compel or persuade men
and women to conform to them, but their efforts had failed most signally. In
vain the police had threatened and punished and the priests had preached
and admonished. Human nature had systematically and obstinately rebelled,
and still rebels, against the unnatural constraint. It is time, therefore, to try a
new system. Instead of continuing, as has been done for thousands of years,
to force men and women, as it were, into badly fitting, unelastic clothes
which cause intense discomfort and prevent all healthy muscular action,
why not adapt the costume to the anatomy and physiology of the human
frame? Then the clothes will no longer be rent, and those who wear them
will be contented and happy.
Unfortunately for the progress of humanity there are serious obstacles in
the way of this radical change of system. The absurd, antiquated and
pernicious institutions and customs are supported by abstruse metaphysical
reasons and enshrined in mystical romantic sentiment, and in this way they
may still be preserved for generations unless the axe be laid to the root of
the tree. Now is the critical moment. Russia must be made to rise at once
from the metaphysical to the positivist stage of intellectual development;
metaphysical reasoning and romantic sentiment must be rigorously
discarded; and everything must be brought to the touchstone of naked
practical utility.
One might naturally suppose that men holding such opinions must be
materialists of the grossest type—and, indeed, many of them gloried in the
name of materialist and atheist—but such an inference would be erroneous.
While denouncing metaphysics, they were themselves metaphysicians in so
far as they were constantly juggling with abstract conceptions, and letting
themselves be guided in their walk and conversation by a priori deductions;
while ridiculing romanticism, they had romantic sentiment enough to make

Page 590

them sacrifice their time, their property, and sometimes even their life, to
the attainment of an unrealisable ideal; and while congratulating themselves
on having passed from the religious to the positivist stage of intellectual
development, they frequently showed themselves animated with the spirit
of the early martyrs! Rarely have the strange inconsistencies of human
nature been so strikingly exemplified as in these unpractical, anti-religious
fanatics. In dealing with them I might easily, without very great
exaggeration, produce a most amusing caricature, but I prefer describing
them as they really were. A few years after the period here referred to I
knew some of them intimately, and I must say that, without at all sharing or
sympathising with their opinions, I could not help respecting them as
honourable, upright, quixotic men and women who had made great
sacrifices for their convictions. One of them whom I have specially in view
at this moment suffered patiently for years from the utter shipwreck of his
generous illusions, and when he could no longer hope to see the dawn of a
brighter day, he ended by committing suicide. Yet that man believed himself
to be a Realist, a Materialist, and a Utilitarian of the purest water, and
habitually professed a scathing contempt for every form of romantic
sentiment! In reality he was one of the best and most sympathetic men I
have ever known.
To return from this digression. So long as the subversive opinions were
veiled in abstract language they raised misgivings in only a comparative
small circle; but when school-teachers put them into a form suited to the
juvenile mind, they were apt to produce startling effects. In a satirical novel
of the time a little girl is represented as coming to her mother and saying,
"Little mamma! Maria Ivan'na (our new school-mistress) says there is no
God and no Tsar, and that it is wrong to marry!" Whether such incidents
actually occurred in real life, as several friends assured me, I am not
prepared to say, but certainly people believed that they might occur in their
own families, and that was quite sufficient to produce alarm even in the
ranks of the Liberals, to say nothing of the rapidly increasing army of the
Reactionaries.
To illustrate the general uneasiness produced in St. Petersburg, I may
quote here a letter written in October, 1861, by a man who occupied one of
the highest positions in the Administration. As he had the reputation of
being an ultra-Liberal who sympathised overmuch with Young Russia, we

Page 591

may assume that he did not take an exceptionally alarmist view of the
situation.
"You have not been long absent—merely a few months; but if you
returned now, you would be astonished by the progress which the
Opposition, one might say the Revolutionary Party, has already made. The
disorders in the university do not concern merely the students. I see in the
affair the beginning of serious dangers for public tranquillity and the
existing order of things. Young people, without distinction of costume,
uniform and origin, take part in the street demonstrations. Besides the
students of the university, there are the students of other institutions, and a
mass of people who are students only in name. Among these last are certain
gentlemen in long beards and a number of revolutionnaires in crinoline,
who are of all the most fanatical. Blue collars—the distinguishing mark of
the students' uniform—have become the signe de ralliement. Almost all the
professors and many officers take the part of the students. The newspaper
critics openly defend their colleagues. Mikhailof has been convicted of
writing, printing and circulating one of the most violent proclamations that
ever existed, under the heading, 'To the young generation!' Among the
students and the men of letters there is unquestionably an organised
conspiracy, which has perhaps leaders outside the literary circle. . . . The
police are powerless. They arrest any one they can lay hands on. About
eighty people have already been sent to the fortress and examined, but all
this leads to no practical result, because the revolutionary ideas have taken
possession of all classes, all ages, all professions, and are publicly
expressed in the streets, in the barracks, and in the Ministries. I believe the
police itself is carried away by them! What this will lead to, it is difficult to
predict. I am very much afraid of some bloody catastrophe. Even if it
should not go to such a length immediately, the position of the Government
will be extremely difficult. Its authority is shaken, and all are convinced that
it is powerless, stupid and incapable. On that point there is the most perfect
unanimity among all parties of all colours, even the most opposite. The
most desperate 'planter'* agrees in that respect with the most desperate
socialist. Meanwhile those who have the direction of affairs do almost
nothing and have no plan or definite aim in view. At present the Emperor is
not in the Capital, and now, more than at any other time, there is complete
anarchy in the absence of the master of the house. There is a great deal of
bustle and talk, and all blame they know not whom."**

Page 592

* An epithet commonly applied, at the time of the
Emancipation, to the partisans of serfage and the defenders
of the proprietors' rights.

** I found this interesting letter (which might have been
written today) thirty years ago among the private papers of
Nicholas Milutin, who played a leading part as an official
in the reforms of the time. It was first published in an
article on "Secret Societies in Russia," which I contributed
to the Fortnightly Review of 1st August, 1877.

The expected revolution did not take place, but timid people had no
difficulty in perceiving signs of its approach. The Press continued to
disseminate, under a more or less disguised form, ideas which were
considered dangerous. The Kolokol, a Russian revolutionary paper
published in London by Herzen and strictly prohibited by the Press-censure,
found its way in large quantities into the country, and, as is recorded in an
earlier chapter, was read by thousands, including the higher officials and the
Emperor himself, who found it regularly on his writing-table, laid there by
some unknown hand. In St. Petersburg the arrest of Tchernishevski and the
suspension of his magazine, The Contemporary, made the writers a little
more cautious in their mode of expression, but the spirit of the articles
remained unchanged. These energetic intolerant leaders of public opinion
were novi homines not personally connected with the social strata in which
moderate views and retrograde tenderness had begun to prevail. Mostly
sons of priests or of petty officials, they belonged to a recently created
literary proletariat composed of young men with boundless aspirations and
meagre national resources, who earned a precarious subsistence by
journalism or by giving lessons in private families. Living habitually in a
world of theories and unrestrained by practical acquaintance with public
life, they were ready, from the purest and most disinterested motives to
destroy ruthlessly the existing order of things in order to realise their crude
notions of social regeneration. Their heated imagination showed them in the
near future a New Russia, composed of independent federated Communes,
without any bureaucracy or any central power—a happy land in which
everybody virtuously and automatically fulfilled his public and private
duties, and in which the policeman and all other embodiments of material
constraint were wholly superfluous.
Governments are not easily converted to Utopian schemes of that idyllic
type, and it is not surprising that even a Government with liberal
humanitarian aspirations like that of Alexander II. should have become

Page 593

alarmed and should have attempted to stem the current. What is to be
regretted is that the repressive measures adopted were a little too Oriental in
their character. Scores of young students of both sexes—for the Nihilist
army included a strong female contingent—were secretly arrested and
confined for months in unwholesome prisons, and many of them were
finally exiled, without any regular trial, to distant provinces in European
Russia or to Siberia. Their exile, it is true, was not at all so terrible as is
commonly supposed, because political exiles are not usually confined in
prisons or compelled to labour in the mines, but are obliged merely to
reside at a given place under police supervision. Still, such punishment was
severe enough for educated young men and women, especially when their
lot was cast among a population composed exclusively of peasants and
small shop-keepers or of Siberian aborigines, and when there were no
means of satisfying the most elementary intellectual wants. For those who
had no private resources the punishment was particularly severe, because
the Government granted merely a miserable monthly pittance, hardly
sufficient to purchase food of the coarsest kind, and there was rarely an
opportunity of adding to the meagre official allowance by intellectual or
manual labour. In all cases the treatment accorded to the exiles wounded
their sense of justice and increased the existing discontent among their
friends and acquaintances. Instead of acting as a deterrent, the system
produced a feeling of profound indignation, and ultimately transformed not
a few sentimental dreamers into active conspirators.
At first there was no conspiracy or regularly organised secret society and
nothing of which the criminal law in Western Europe could have taken
cognisance. Students met in each other's rooms to discuss prohibited books
on political and social science, and occasionally short essays on the subjects
discussed were written in a revolutionary spirit by members of the coterie.
This was called mutual instruction. Between the various coteries or groups
there were private personal relations, not only in the capital, but also in the
provinces, so that manuscripts and printed papers could be transmitted from
one group to another. From time to time the police captured these academic
disquisitions, and made raids on the meetings of students who had come
together merely for conversation and discussion; and the fresh arrests
caused by these incidents increased the hostility to the Government.
In the letter above quoted it is said that the revolutionary ideas had taken
possession of all classes, all ages, and all professions. This may have been

Page 594

true with regard to St. Petersburg, but it could not have been said of the
provinces. There the landed proprietors were in a very different frame of
mind. They had to struggle with a multitude of urgent practical affairs
which left them little time for idyllic dreaming about an imaginary
millennium. Their serfs had been emancipated, and what remained to them
of their estates had to be reorganised on the basis of free labour. Into the
semi-chaotic state of things created by such far-reaching changes, legal and
economic, they did not wish to see any more confusion introduced, and they
did not at all feel that they could dispense with the Central Government and
the policeman. On the contrary, the Central Government was urgently
needed in order to obtain a little ready money wherewith to reorganise the
estates in the new conditions, and the police organisation required to be
strengthened in order to compel the emancipated serfs to fulfil their legal
obligations. These men and their families were, therefore, much more
conservative than the class commonly designated "the young generation,"
and they naturally sympathised with the "Philistines" in St. Petersburg, who
had been alarmed by the exaggerations of the Nihilists.
Even the landed proprietors, however, were not so entirely free from
discontent and troublesome political aspirations as the Government would
have desired. They had not forgotten the autocratic and bureaucratic way in
which the Emancipation had been prepared, and their indignation had been
only partially appeased by their being allowed to carry out the provisions of
the law without much bureaucratic interference. So much for the discontent.
As for the reform aspirations, they thought that, as a compensation for
having consented to the liberation of their serfs and for having been
expropriated from about a half of their land, they ought to receive extensive
political rights, and be admitted, like the upper classes in Western Europe,
to a fair share in the government of the country. Unlike the fiery young
Nihilists of St. Petersburg, they did not want to abolish or paralyse the
central power; what they wanted was to co-operate with it loyally and to
give their advice on important questions by means of representative
institutions. They formed a constitutional group which exists still at the
present day, as we shall see in the sequel, but which has never been allowed
to develop into an organised political party. Its aims were so moderate that
its programme might have been used as a convenient safety-valve for the
explosive forces which were steadily accumulating under the surface of
Society, but it never found favour in the official world. When some of its

Page 595

leading members ventured to hint in the Press and in loyal addresses to the
Emperor that the Government would do well to consult the country on
important questions, their respectful suggestions were coldly received or
bluntly rejected by the bureaucracy and the Autocratic Power.
The more the revolutionary and constitutional groups sought to
strengthen their position, the more pronounced became the reactionary
tendencies in the official world, and these received in 1863 an immense
impetus from the Polish insurrection, with which the Nihilists and even
some of the Liberals sympathised.* That ill-advised attempt on the part of
the Poles to recover their independence had a curious effect on Russian
public opinion. Alexander II., with the warm approval of the more Liberal
section of the educated classes, was in the course of creating for Poland
almost complete administrative autonomy under the viceroyalty of a
Russian Grand Duke; and the Emperor's brother Constantine was preparing
to carry out the scheme in a generous spirit. Soon it became evident that
what the Poles wanted was not administrative autonomy, but political
independence, with the frontiers which existed before the first partition!
Trusting to the expected assistance of the Western Powers and the secret
connivance of Austria, they raised the standard of insurrection, and some
trifling successes were magnified by the pro-Polish Press into important
victories. As the news of the rising spread over Russia, there was a moment
of hesitation. Those who had been for some years habitually extolling
liberty and self-government as the normal conditions of progress, who had
been sympathising warmly with every Liberal movement, whether at home
or abroad, and who had put forward a voluntary federation of independent
Communes as the ideal State organism, could not well frown on the
political aspirations of the Polish patriots. The Liberal sentiment of that
time was so extremely philosophical and cosmopolitan that it hardly
distinguished between Poles and Russians, and liberty was supposed to be
the birthright of every man and woman to whatever nationality they might
happen to belong. But underneath these beautiful artificial clouds of
cosmopolitan Liberal sentiment lay the volcano of national patriotism,
dormant for the moment, but by no means extinct. Though the Russians are
in some respects the most cosmopolitan of European nations, they are at the
same time capable of indulging in violent outbursts of patriotic fanaticism;
and events in Warsaw brought into hostile contact these two contradictory
elements in the national character. The struggle was only momentary. Ere

Page 596

long the patriotic feelings gained the upper hand and crushed all
cosmopolitan sympathy with political freedom. The Moscow Gazette, the
first of the papers to recover its mental equilibrium, thundered against the
pseudo-Liberal sentimentalism, which would, if unchecked, necessarily
lead to the dismemberment of the Empire, and its editor, Katkoff, became
for a time the most influential private individual in the country. A few,
indeed, remained true to their convictions. Herzen, for instance, wrote in the
Kolokol a glowing panegyric on two Russian officers who had refused to
fire on the insurgents; and here and there a good Orthodox Russian might
be found who confessed that he was ashamed of Muravieff's extreme
severity in Lithuania. But such men were few, and were commonly
regarded as traitors, especially after the ill-advised diplomatic intervention
of the Western Powers. Even Herzen, by his publicly expressed sympathy
with the insurgents, lost entirely his popularity and influence among his
fellow-countrymen. The great majority of the public thoroughly approved
of the severe energetic measures adopted by the Government, and when the
insurrection was suppressed, men who had a few months previously spoken
and written in magniloquent terms about humanitarian Liberalism joined in
the ovations offered to Muravieff! At a great dinner given in his honour, that
ruthless administrator of the old Muscovite type, who had systematically
opposed the emancipation of the serfs and had never concealed his
contempt for the Liberal ideas in fashion, could ironically express his
satisfaction at seeing around him so many "new friends"!** This revulsion
of public feeling gave the Moscow Slavophils an opportunity of again
preaching their doctrine that the safety and prosperity of Russia were to be
found, not in the Liberalism and Constitutionalism of Western Europe, but
in patriarchal autocracy, Eastern Orthodoxy, and other peculiarities of
Russian nationality. Thus the reactionary tendencies gained ground; but
Alexander II., while causing all political agitation to be repressed, did not at
once abandon his policy of introducing radical reforms by means of the
Autocratic Power. On the contrary, he gave orders that the preparatory work
for creating local self-government and reorganising the Law Courts should
be pushed on energetically. The important laws for the establishment of the
Zemstvo and for the great judicial reforms, which I have described in
previous chapters, both date from the year 1864.

* The students of the St. Petersburg University scandalised
their more patriotic fellow-countrymen by making a

Page 597

pro-Polish demonstration.

** In fairness to Count Muravieff I must say that he was not
quite so black as he was painted in the Polish and
West-European Press. He left an interesting autobiographical
fragment relating to the history of this time, but it is not
likely to be printed for some years. As an historical
document it is valuable, but must be used with caution by
the future historian. A copy of it was for some time in my
possession, but I was bound by a promise not to make
extracts.

These and other reforms of a less important kind made no impression on
the young irreconcilables. A small group of them, under the leadership of a
certain Ishutin, formed in Moscow a small secret society, and conceived the
design of assassinating the Emperor, in the hope that his son and successor,
who was erroneously supposed to be imbued with ultra-Liberal ideas, might
continue the work which his father had begun and had not the courage to
complete. In April, 1866, the attempt on the life of the Emperor was made
by a youth called Karakozof as his Majesty was leaving a public garden in
St. Petersburg, but the bullet happily missed its mark, and the culprit was
executed.
This incident formed a turning-point in the policy of the Government.
Alexander II. began to fear that he had gone too far, or, at least, too quickly,
in his policy of radical reform. An Imperial rescript announced that law,
property, and religion were in danger, and that the Government would lean
on the Noblesse and other conservative elements of Society. The two
periodicals which advocated the most advanced views (Sovremennik and
Russkoye Slovo) were suppressed permanently, and precautions were taken
to prevent the annual assemblies of the Zemstvo from giving public
expression to the aspirations of the moderate Liberals.
A secret official inquiry showed that the revolutionary agitation
proceeded in all cases from young men who were studying, or had recently
studied, in the universities, the seminaries, or the technical schools, such as
the Medical Academy and the Agricultural Institute. Plainly, therefore, the
system of education was at fault. The semi-military system of the time of
Nicholas had been supplanted by one in which discipline was reduced to a
minimum and the study of natural science formed a prominent element.
Here it was thought, lay the chief root of the evil. Englishmen may have
some difficulty in imagining a possible connection between natural science
and revolutionary agitation. To them the two things must seem wide as the

Page 598

poles asunder. Surely mathematics, chemistry, physiology, and similar
subjects have nothing to do with politics. When a young Englishman takes
to studying any branch of natural science he gets up his subject by means of
lectures, text-books, and museums or laboratories, and when he has
mastered it he probably puts his knowledge to some practical use. In Russia
it is otherwise. Few students confine themselves to their speciality. The
majority of them dislike the laborious work of mastering dry details, and,
with the presumption which is often found in conjunction with youth and a
smattering of knowledge, they aspire to become social reformers and
imagine themselves specially qualified for such activity.
But what, it may be asked, has social reform to do with natural science? I
have already indicated the connection in the Russian mind. Though very
few of the students of that time had ever read the voluminous works of
Auguste Comte, they were all more or less imbued with the spirit of the
Positive Philosophy, in which all the sciences are subsidiary to sociology,
and social reorganisation is the ultimate object of scientific research. The
imaginative Positivist can see with prophetic eye humanity reorganised on
strictly scientific principles. Cool-headed people who have had a little
experience of the world, if they ever indulge in such delightful dreams,
recognise clearly that this ultimate goal of human intellectual activity, if it is
ever to be reached, is still a long way off in the misty distance of the future;
but the would-be social reformers among the Russian students of the sixties
were too young, too inexperienced, and too presumptuously self-confident
to recognise this plain, simple truth. They felt that too much valuable time
had been already lost, and they were madly impatient to begin the great
work without further delay. As soon as they had acquired a smattering of
chemistry, physiology, and biology they imagined themselves capable of
reorganising human society from top to bottom, and when they had
acquired this conviction they were of course unfitted for the patient,
plodding study of details.
To remedy these evils, Count Dimitri Tolstoy, who was regarded as a
pillar of Conservatism, was appointed Minister of Public Instruction, with
the mission of protecting the young generation against pernicious ideas, and
eradicating from the schools, colleges, and universities all revolutionary
tendencies. He determined to introduce more discipline into all the
educational establishments and to supplant to a certain extent the superficial
study of natural science by the thorough study of the classics—that is to

Page 599

say, Latin and Greek. This scheme, which became known before it was
actually put into execution, produced a storm of discontent in the young
generation. Discipline at that time was regarded as an antiquated and
useless remnant of patriarchal tyranny, and young men who were impatient
to take part in social reorganisation resented being treated as naughty
schoolboys. To them it seemed that the Latin grammar was an ingenious
instrument for stultifying youthful intelligence, destroying intellectual
development, and checking political progress. Ingenious speculations about
the possible organisation of the working classes and grandiose views of the
future of humanity are so much more interesting and agreeable than the
rules of Latin syntax and the Greek irregular verbs!
Count Tolstoy could congratulate himself on the efficacy of his
administration, for from the time of his appointment there was a lull in the
political excitement. During three or four years there was only one political
trial, and that an insignificant one; whereas there had been twenty between
1861 and 1864, and all more or less important. I am not at all sure,
however, that the educational reform which created much momentary
irritation and discontent had anything to do with the improvement in the
situation. In any case, there were other and more potent causes at work. The
excitement was too intense to be long-lived, and the fashionable theories
too fanciful to stand the wear and tear of everyday life. They evaporated,
therefore, with amazing rapidity when the leaders of the movement had
disappeared—Tchernishevski and others by exile, and Dobrolubof and
Pissaref by death—and when among the less prominent representatives of
the younger generation many succumbed to the sobering influences of time
and experience or drifted into lucrative professions. Besides this, the
reactionary currents were making themselves felt, especially since the
attempt on the life of the Emperor. So long as these had been confined to
the official world they had not much affected the literature, except
externally through the Press-censure, but when they permeated the reading
public their influence was much stronger. Whatever the cause, there is no
doubt that, in the last years of the sixties, there was a subsidence of
excitement and enthusiasm and the peculiar intellectual phenomenon which
had been nicknamed Nihilism was supposed to be a thing of the past. In
reality the movement of which Nihilism was a prominent manifestation had
merely lost something of its academic character and was entering on a new
stage of development.

Page 600

Page 601

CHAPTER XXXV
SOCIALIST PROPAGANDA, REVOLUTIONARY
AGITATION, AND TERRORISM

Closer Relations with Western Socialism—Attempts to Influence the
Masses—Bakunin and Lavroff—"Going in among the People"—The
Missionaries of Revolutionary Socialism—Distinction between Propaganda
and Agitation—Revolutionary Pamphlets for the Common People—Aims
and Motives of the Propagandists—Failure of Propaganda—Energetic
Repression—Fruitless Attempts at Agitation—Proposal to Combine with
Liberals—Genesis of Terrorism—My Personal Relations with the
Revolutionists—Shadowers and Shadowed—A Series of Terrorist Crimes—
A Revolutionist Congress—Unsuccessful Attempts to Assassinate the Tsar
—Ineffectual Attempt at Conciliation by Loris Melikof—Assassination of
Alexander II.—The Executive Committee Shows Itself Unpractical—
Widespread Indignation and Severe Repression—Temporary Collapse of
the Revolutionary Movement—A New Revolutionary Movement in Sight.
Count Tolstoy's educational reform had one effect which was not
anticipated: it brought the revolutionists into closer contact with Western
Socialism. Many students, finding their position in Russia uncomfortable,
determined to go abroad and continue their studies in foreign universities,
where they would be free from the inconveniences of police supervision
and Press-censure. Those of the female sex had an additional motive to
emigrate, because they could not complete their studies in Russia, but they
had more difficulty in carrying out their intention, because parents naturally
disliked the idea of their daughters going abroad to lead a Bohemian life,
and they very often obstinately refused to give their consent. In such cases
the persistent daughter found herself in a dilemma. Though she might run
away from her family and possibly earn her own living, she could not cross
the frontier without a passport, and without the parental sanction a passport
could not be obtained. Of course she might marry and get the consent of her
husband, but most of the young ladies objected to the trammels of
matrimony. Occasionally the problem was solved by means of a fictitious

Page 602

marriage, and when a young man could not be found to co-operate
voluntarily in the arrangement, the Terrorist methods, which the
revolutionists adopted a few years later for other purposes, might be
employed. I have heard of at least one case in which an ardent female
devotee of medical science threatened to shoot a student who was going
abroad if he did not submit to the matrimonial ceremony and allow her to
accompany him to the frontier as his official wife!
Strange as this story may seem, it contains nothing inherently
improbable. At that time the energetic young ladies of the Nihilist school
were not to be diverted from their purpose by trifling obstacles. We shall
meet some of them hereafter, displaying great courage and tenacity in
revolutionary activity. One of them, for example, attempted to murder the
Prefect of St. Petersburg; and another, a young person of considerable
refinement and great personal charm, gave the signal for the assassination
of Alexander II. and expiated her crime on the scaffold without the least
sign of repentance.
Most of the studious emigres of both sexes went to Zurich, where female
students were admitted to the medical classes. Here they made the
acquaintance of noted Socialists from various countries who had settled in
Switzerland, and being in search of panaceas for social regeneration, they
naturally fell under their influence, at the same time they read with avidity
the works of Proudhon, Lassalle, Buchner, Marx, Flerovski, Pfeiffer, and
other writers of "advanced opinions."
Among the apostles of socialism living at that time in Switzerland they
found a sympathetic fellow-countryman in the famous Anarchist, Bakunin,
who had succeeded in escaping from Siberia. His ideal was the immediate
overthrow of all existing Governments, the destruction of all administrative
organisation, the abolition of all bourgeois institutions, and the
establishment of an entirely new order of things on the basis of a free
federation of productive Communes, in which all the land should be
distributed among those capable of tilling it and the instruments of
production confided to co-operative associations. Efforts to obtain mere
political reforms, even of the most radical type, were regarded by him with
contempt as miserable palliatives, which could be of no real, permanent
benefit to the masses, and might be positively injurious by prolonging the
present era of bourgeois domination.

Page 603

For the dissemination of these principles a special organ called The
Cause of the People (Narodnoye Dyelo) was founded in Geneva in 1868
and was smuggled across the Russian frontier in considerable quantities. It
aimed at drawing away the young generation from Academic Nihilism to
more practical revolutionary activity, but it evidently remained to some
extent under the old influences, for it indulged occasionally in very abstract
philosophical disquisitions. In its first number, for example, it published a
programme in which the editors thought it necessary to declare that they
were materialists and atheists, because the belief in God and a future life, as
well as every other kind of idealism, demoralises the people, inspiring it
with mutually contradictory aspirations, and thereby depriving it of the
energy necessary for the conquest of its natural rights in this world, and the
complete organisation of a free and happy life. At the end of two years this
organ for moralising the people collapsed from want of funds, but other
periodicals and pamphlets were printed, and the clandestine relations
between the exiles in Switzerland and their friends in St. Petersburg were
maintained without difficulty, notwithstanding the efforts of the police to
cut the connection. In this way Young Russia became more and more
saturated with the extreme Socialist theories current in Western Europe.
Thanks partly to this foreign influence and partly to their own practical
experience, the would-be reformers who remained at home came to
understand that academic talking and discussing could bring about no
serious results. Students alone, however numerous and however devoted to
the cause, could not hope to overthrow or coerce the Government. It was
childish to suppose that the walls of the autocratic Jericho would fall by the
blasts of academic trumpets. Attempts at revolution could not be successful
without the active support of the people, and consequently the revolutionary
agitation must be extended to the masses. So far there was complete
agreement among the revolutionists, but with regard to the modus operandi
emphatic differences of opinion appeared. Those who were carried away by
the stirring accents of Bakunin imagined that if the masses could only be
made to feel themselves the victims of administrative and economic
oppression, they would rise and free themselves by a united effort.
According to this view all that was required was that popular discontent
should be excited and that precautions should be taken to ensure that the
explosions of discontent should take place simultaneously all over the
country. The rest might safely be left, it was thought, to the operation of

Page 604

natural forces and the inspiration of the moment. Against this dangerous
illusion warning voices were raised. Lavroff, for example, while agreeing
with Bakunin that mere political reforms were of little or no value, and that
any genuine improvement in the condition of the working classes could
proceed only from economic and social reorganisation, maintained stoutly
that the revolution, to be permanent and beneficial, must be accomplished,
not by demagogues directing the ignorant masses, but by the people as a
whole, after it had been enlightened and instructed as to its true interests.
The preparatory work would necessarily require a whole generation of
educated propagandists, living among the labouring population rural and
urban.
For some time there was a conflict between these two currents of
opinion, but the views of Lavroff, which were simply a practical
development of academic Nihilism, gained far more adherents than the
violent anarchical proposals of Bakunin, and finally the grandiose scheme
of realising gradually the Socialist ideal by indoctrinating the masses was
adopted with enthusiasm. In St. Petersburg, Moscow and other large towns
the student association for mutual instruction, to which I have referred in
the foregoing chapter, became centres of popular propaganda, and the
academic Nihilists were transformed into active missionaries. Scores of
male and female students, impatient to convert the masses to the gospel of
freedom and terrestrial felicity, sought to get into touch with the common
people by settling in the villages as school-teachers, medical practitioners,
midwives, etc., or by working as common factory hands in the industrial
centres. In order to obtain employment in the factories and conceal their
real purpose, they procured false passports, in which they were described as
belonging to the lower classes; and even those who settled in the villages
lived generally under assumed names. Thus was formed a class of
professional revolutionists, sometimes called the Illegals, who were liable
to be arrested at any moment by the police. As compensation for the
privations and hardships which they had to endure, they had the consolation
of believing that they were advancing the good cause. The means they
usually employed were formal conversations and pamphlets expressly
written for the purpose. The more enthusiastic and persevering of these
missionaries would continue their efforts for months and years, remaining
in communication with the headquarters in the capital or some provincial
town in order to report progress, obtain a fresh supply of pamphlets, and get

Page 605

their forged passports renewed. This extraordinary movement was called
"going in among the people," and it spread among the young generation like
an epidemic. In 1873 it was suddenly reinforced by a detachment of fresh
recruits. Over a hundred Russian students were recalled by the Government
from Switzerland, in order to save them from the baneful influence of
Bakunin, Lavroff, and other noted Socialists, and a large proportion of them
joined the ranks of the propagandists.*

* Instances of going in among the people had happened as
early as 1864, but they did not become frequent till after
1870.

With regard to the aims and methods of the propagandists, a good deal of
information was obtained in the course of a judicial inquiry instituted in
1875. A peasant, who was at the same time a factory worker, informed the
police that certain persons were distributing revolutionary pamphlets among
the factory-hands, and as a proof of what he said he produced some
pamphlets which he had himself received. This led to an investigation,
which showed that a number of young men and women, evidently
belonging to the educated classes, were disseminating revolutionary ideas
by means of pamphlets and conversation. Arrests followed, and it was soon
discovered that these agitators belonged to a large secret association, which
had its centre in Moscow and local branches in Ivanovo, Tula, and Kief. In
Ivanovo, for instance—a manufacturing town about a hundred miles to the
northeast of Moscow—the police found a small apartment inhabited by
three young men and four young women, all of whom, though belonging by
birth to the educated classes, had the appearance of ordinary factory
workers, prepared their own food, did with their own hands all the domestic
work, and sought to avoid everything which could distinguish them from
the labouring population. In the apartment were found 240 copies of
revolutionary pamphlets, a considerable sum of money, a large amount of
correspondence in cypher, and several forged passports.
How many persons the society contained, it is impossible to say, because
a large portion of them eluded the vigilance of the police; but many were
arrested, and ultimately forty-seven were condemned. Of these, eleven were
noble, seven were sons of parish priests, and the remainder belong to the
lower classes—that is to say, the small officials, burghers, and peasants. The
average age of the prisoners was twenty-four, the oldest being thirty-six and

Page 606

the youngest under seventeen! Only five or six were over twenty-five, and
none of these were ringleaders. The female element was represented by no
less than fifteen young persons, whose ages were on an average under
twenty-two. Two of these, to judge by their photographs, were of refined,
prepossessing appearance, and seemingly little fitted for taking part in
wholesale massacres such as the society talked of organising.
The character and aims of the society were clearly depicted in the
documentary and oral evidence produced at the trial. According to the
fundamental principles, there should exist among the members absolute
equality, complete mutual responsibility and full frankness and confidence
with regard to the affairs of the association. Among the conditions of
admission we find that the candidate should devote himself entirely to
revolutionary activity; that he should be ready to sever all ties, whether of
friendship or of love, for the good cause; that he should possess great
powers of self-sacrifice and the capacity for keeping secrets; and that he
should consent to become, when necessary, a common labourer in a factory.
The desire to maintain absolute equality is well illustrated by the article of
the statutes regarding the administration: the office-bearers are not to be
chosen by election, but all members are to be office-bearers in turn, and the
term of office must not exceed one month!
The avowed aim of the society was to destroy the existing social order,
and to replace it by one in which there should be no private property and no
distinctions of class or wealth; or, as it is expressed in one document, "to
found on the ruins of the present social organisation the Empire of the
working classes." The means to be employed were indicated in a general
way, but each member was to adapt himself to circumstances and was to
devote all his energy to forwarding the cause of the revolution. For the
guidance of the inexperienced, the following means were recommended:
simple conversations, dissemination of pamphlets, the exciting of
discontent, the formation of organised groups, the creation of funds and
libraries. These, taken together, constitute, in the terminology of
revolutionary science, "propaganda," and in addition to it there should be
"agitation." The technical distinction between these two processes is that
propaganda has a purely preparatory character, and aims merely at
enlightening the masses regarding the true nature of the revolutionary
cause, whereas agitation aims at exciting an individual or a group to acts
which are considered, in the existing regime, as illegal. In time of peace

Page 607

"pure agitation" was to be carried on by means of organised bands which
should frighten the Government and the privileged classes, draw away the
attention of the authorities from less overt kinds of revolutionary action,
raise the spirit of the people and thereby render it more accessible to
revolutionary ideas, obtain pecuniary means for further activity, and liberate
political prisoners. In time of insurrection the members should give to all
movements every assistance in their power, and impress on them a
Socialistic character. The central administration and the local branches
should establish relations with publishers, and take steps to secure a regular
supply of prohibited books from abroad. Such are a few characteristic
extracts from a document which might fairly be called a treatise on
revolutionology.
As a specimen of the revolutionary pamphlets circulated by the
propagandists and agitators I may give here a brief account of one which is
well known to the political police. It is entitled Khitraya Mekhanika
(Cunning Machinery), and gives a graphic picture of the ideas and methods
employed. The mise en scene is extremely simple. Two peasants, Stepan
and Andrei, are represented as meeting in a gin-shop and drinking together.
Stepan is described as good and kindly when he has to do with men of his
own class, but very sharp-tongued when speaking with a foreman or
manager. Always ready with an answer, he can on occasions silence even an
official! He has travelled all over the Empire, has associated with all sorts
and conditions of men, sees everything most clearly, and is, in short, a very
remarkable man. One of his excellent qualities is that, being "enlightened"
himself, he is always ready to enlighten others, and he now finds an
opportunity of displaying his powers. When Andrei, who is still
unenlightened, proposes that they should drink another glass of vodka, he
replies that the Tsar, together with the nobles and traders, bars the way to
the throat. As his companion does not understand this metaphorical
language, he explains that if there were no Tsars, nobles, or traders, he
could get five glasses of vodka for the sum that he now pays for one glass.
This naturally suggests wider topics, and Stepan gives something like a
lecture. The common people, he explains, pay by far the greater part of the
taxation, and at the same time do all the work; they plough the fields, build
the houses and churches, work in the mills and factories, and in return they
are systematically robbed and beaten. And what is done with all the money
that is taken from them? First of all, the Tsar gets nine millions of roubles—

Page 608

enough to feed half a province—and with that sum he amuses himself, has
hunting-parties, and feasts, eats, drinks, makes merry, and lives in stone
houses. He gave liberty, it is true, to the peasants; but we know what the
Emancipation really was. The best land was taken away and the taxes were
increased, lest the muzhik should get fat and lazy. The Tsar is himself the
richest landed proprietor and manufacturer in the country. He not only robs
us as much as he pleases, but he has sold into slavery (by forming a national
debt) our children and grandchildren. He takes our sons as soldiers, shuts
them up in barracks so that they should not see their brother-peasants, and
hardens their hearts so that they become wild beasts, ready to rend their
parents. The nobles and traders likewise rob the poor peasants. In short, all
the upper classes have invented a bit of cunning machinery by which the
muzhik is made to pay for their pleasures and luxuries. The people will one
day rise and break this machinery to pieces. When that day comes they must
break every part of it, for if one bit escapes destruction all the other parts of
it will immediately grow up again. All the force is on the side of the
peasants, if they only knew how to use it. Knowledge will come in time.
They will then destroy this machine, and perceive that the only real remedy
for all social evils is brotherhood. People should live like brothers, having
no mine and thine, but all things in common. When we have created
brotherhood, there will be no riches and no thieves, but right and
righteousness without end. In conclusion, Stepan addresses a word to "the
torturers": "When the people rise, the Tsar will send troops against us, and
the nobles and capitalists will stake their last rouble on the result. If they do
not succeed, they must not expect any quarter from us. They may conquer
us once or twice, but we shall at last get our own, for there is no power that
can withstand the whole people. Then we shall cleanse the country of our
persecutors, and establish a brotherhood in which there will be no mine and
thine, but all will work for the common weal. We shall construct no cunning
machinery, but shall pluck up evil by the roots, and establish eternal
justice!"
The above-mentioned distinction between Propaganda and Agitation,
which plays a considerable part in revolutionary literature, had at that time
more theoretical than practical importance. The great majority of those who
took an active part in the movement confined their efforts to indoctrinating
the masses with Socialistic and subversive ideas, and sometimes their
methods were rather childish. As an illustration I may cite an amusing

Page 609

incident related by one of the boldest and most tenacious of the
revolutionists, who subsequently acquired a certain sense of humour. He
and a friend were walking one day on a country road, when they were
overtaken by a peasant in his cart. Ever anxious to sow the good seed, they
at once entered into conversation with the rustic, telling him that he ought
not to pay his taxes, because the tchinovniks robbed the people, and trying
to convince him by quotations from Scripture that he ought to resist the
authorities. The prudent muzhik whipped up his horse and tried to get out of
hearing, but the two zealots ran after him and continued the sermon till they
were completely out of breath. Other propagandists were more practical,
and preached a species of agrarian socialism which the rural population
could understand. At the time of the Emancipation the peasants were
convinced as I have mentioned in a previous chapter, that the Tsar meant to
give them all the land, and to compensate the landed proprietors by salaries.
Even when the law was read and explained to them, they clung obstinately
to their old convictions, and confidently expected that the REAL
Emancipation would be proclaimed shortly. Taking advantage of this state
of things, the propagandists to whom I refer confirmed the peasants in their
error, and sought in this way to sow discontent against the proprietors and
the Government. Their watchword was "Land and Liberty," and they
formed for a good many years a distinct group, under that title (Zemlya i
Volya, or more briefly Zemlevoltsi).
In the St. Petersburg group, which aspired to direct and control this
movement, there were one or two men who held different views as to the
real object of propaganda and agitation. One of these, Prince Krapotkin, has
told the world what his object was at that time. He hoped that the
Government would be frightened and that the Autocratic Power, as in
France on the eve of the Revolution, would seek support in the landed
proprietors, and call together a National Assembly. Thus a constitution
would be granted, and though the first Assembly might be conservative in
spirit, autocracy would be compelled in the long run to yield to
parliamentary pressure.
No such elaborate projects were entertained, I believe, by the majority of
the propagandists. Their reasoning was much simpler: "The Government,
having become reactionary, tries to prevent us from enlightening the people;
we will do it in spite of the Government!" The dangers to which they
exposed themselves only confirmed them in their resolution. Though they

Page 610

honestly believed themselves to be Realists and Materialists, they were at
heart romantic Idealists, panting to do something heroic. They had been
taught by the apostles whom they venerated, from Belinski downwards, that
the man who simply talks about the good of the people, and does nothing to
promote it, is among the most contemptible of human beings. No such
reproach must be addressed to them. If the Government opposed and
threatened, that was no excuse for inactivity. They must be up and doing.
"Forward! forward! Let us plunge into the people, identify ourselves with
them, and work for their benefit! Suffering is in store for us, but we must
endure it with fortitude!" The type which Tchernishevski had depicted in his
famous novel, under the name of Rakhmetof—the youth who led an ascetic
life and subjected himself to privation and suffering as a preparation for
future revolutionary activity—now appeared in the flesh. If we may credit
Bakunin, these Rakhmetofs had not even the consolation of believing in the
possibility of a revolution, but as they could not and would not remain
passive spectators of the misfortunes of the people, they resolved to go in
among the masses in order to share with them fraternally their sufferings,
and at the same time to teach and prepare, not theoretically, but practically
by their living example.* This is, I believe, an exaggeration. The
propagandists were, for the most part of incredibly sanguine temperament.

* Bakunin: "Gosudarstvennost' i Anarkhiya" ("State
Organisation and Anarchy"), Zurich, 1873.

The success of the propaganda and agitation was not at all in proportion
to the numbers and enthusiasm of those who took part in it. Most of these
displayed more zeal than mother-wit and discretion. Their Socialism was
too abstract and scientific to be understood by rustics, and when they
succeeded in making themselves intelligible they awakened in their hearers
more suspicion than sympathy. The muzhik is a very matter-of-fact practical
person, totally incapable of understanding what Americans call "hifalutin"
tendencies in speech and conduct, and as he listened to the preaching of the
new Gospel doubts and questionings spontaneously rose in his mind: "What
do those young people, who betray their gentlefolk origin by their delicate
white hands, their foreign phrases, their ignorance of the common things of
everyday peasant life, really want? Why are they bearing hardships and
taking so much trouble? They tell us it is for our good, but we are not such
fools and simpletons as they take us for. They are not doing it all for

Page 611

nothing. What do they expect from us in return? Whatever it is, they are
evidently evil-doers, and perhaps moshenniki (swindlers). Devil take
them!" and thereupon the cautious muzhik turns his back upon his
disinterested self-sacrificing teachers, or goes quietly and denounces them
to the police! It is not only in Spain that we encounter Don Quixotes and
Sancho Panzas!
Occasionally a worse fate befell the missionaries. If they allowed
themselves, as they sometimes did, to "blaspheme" against religion or the
Tsar, they ran the risk of being maltreated on the spot. I have heard of one
case in which the punishment for blasphemy was applied by sturdy peasant
matrons. Even when they escaped such mishaps they had not much reason
to congratulate themselves on their success. After three years of arduous
labour the hundreds of apostles could not boast of more than a score or two
of converts among the genuine working classes, and even these few did not
all remain faithful unto death. Some of them, however, it must be admitted,
laboured and suffered to the end with the courage and endurance of true
martyrs.
It was not merely the indifference or hostility of the masses that the
propagandists had to complain of. The police soon got on their track, and
did not confine themselves to persuasion and logical arguments. Towards
the end of 1873 they arrested some members of the central directory group
in St. Petersburg, and in the following May they discovered in the province
of Saratof an affiliated organisation with which nearly 800 persons were
connected, about one-fifth of them belonging to the female sex. A few came
of well-to-do families—sons and daughters of minor officials or small
landed proprietors—but the great majority were poor students of humbler
origin, a large contingent being supplied by the sons of the poor parish
clergy. In other provinces the authorities made similar discoveries. Before
the end of the year a large proportion of the propagandists were in prison,
and the centralised organisation, so far as such a thing existed, was
destroyed. Gradually it dawned on the minds even of the Don Quixotes that
pacific propaganda was no longer possible, and that attempts to continue it
could lead only to useless sacrifices.
For a time there was universal discouragement in the revolutionary ranks;
and among those who had escaped arrest there were mutual recriminations
and endless discussions about the causes of failure and the changes to be

Page 612

made in modes of action. The practical results of these recriminations and
discussions was that the partisans of a slow, pacific propaganda retired to
the background, and the more impatient revolutionary agitators took
possession of the movement. These maintained stoutly that as pacific
propaganda had become impossible, stronger methods must be adopted.
The masses must be organised so as to offer successful resistance to the
Government. Conspiracies must therefore be formed, local disorders
provoked, and blood made to flow. The part of the country which seemed
best adapted for experiments of this kind was the southern and southeastern
region, inhabited by the descendants of the turbulent Cossack population
which had raised formidable insurrections under Stenka Razin and
Pugatcheff in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here, then, the more
impatient agitators began their work. A Kief group called the Buntari
(rioters), composed of about twenty-five individuals, settled in various
localities as small shopkeepers or horse dealers, or went about as workmen
or peddlers. One member of the group has given us in his reminiscences an
amusing account of the experiment. Everywhere the agitators found the
peasants suspicious and inhospitable, and consequently they had to suffer a
great deal of discomfort. Some of them at once gave up the task as
hopeless. The others settled in a village and began operations. Having made
a topographic survey of the locality, they worked out an ingenious plan of
campaign; but they had no recruits for the future army of insurrection, and
if they had been able to get recruits, they had no arms for them, and no
money wherewith to purchase arms or anything else. In these circumstances
they gravely appointed a committee to collect funds, knowing very well that
no money would be forthcoming. It was as if a shipwrecked crew in an
open boat, having reached the brink of starvation, appointed a committee to
obtain a supply of fresh water and provisions! In the hope of obtaining
assistance from headquarters, a delegate was sent to St. Petersburg and
Moscow to explain that for the arming of the population about a quarter of a
million of roubles was required. The delegate brought back thirty second-
hand revolvers! The revolutionist who confesses all this* recognises that the
whole scheme was childishly unpractical: "We chose the path of popular
insurrection because we had faith in the revolutionary spirit of the masses,
in its power and its invincibility. That was the weak side of our position;
and the most curious part of it was that we drew proofs in support of our
theory from history—from the abortive insurrections of Pazin and

Page 613

Pugatcheff, which took place in an age when the Government had only a
small regular army and no railways or telegraphs! We did not even think of
attempting a propaganda among the military!" In the district of Tchigirin the
agitators had a little momentary success, but the result was the same. There
a student called Stefanovitch pretended that the Tsar was struggling with the
officials to benefit the peasantry, and he showed the simple rustics a forged
imperial manifesto in which they were ordered to form a society for the
purpose of raising an insurrection against the officials, the nobles, and the
priests. At one moment (April, 1877), the society had about 600 members,
but a few months later it was discovered by the police, and the leaders and
peasants were arrested.

* Debogorio-Mokrievitch. "Vospominaniya" ("Reminiscences").
Paris, 1894-99.

When it had thus become evident that propaganda and agitation were
alike useless, and when numerous arrests were being made daily, it became
necessary for the revolutionists to reconsider their position, and some of the
more moderate proposed to rally to the Liberals, as a temporary measure.
Hitherto there had been very little sympathy and a good deal of openly
avowed hostility between Liberals and revolutionists. The latter, convinced
that they could overthrow the Autocratic Power by their own unaided
efforts, had looked askance at Liberalism because they believed that
parliamentary discussions and party struggles would impede rather than
facilitate the advent of the Socialist Millennium, and strengthen the
domination of the bourgeoisie without really improving the condition of the
masses. Now, however, when the need of allies was felt, it seemed that
constitutional government might be used as a stepping-stone for reaching
the Socialist ideal, because it must grant a certain liberty of the Press and of
association, and it would necessarily abolish the existing autocratic system
of arresting, imprisoning and exiling, on mere suspicion, without any
regular form of legal procedure. As usual, an appeal was made to history,
and arguments were easily found in favour of this course of action. The past
of other nations had shown that in the march of progress there are no
sudden leaps and bounds, and it was therefore absurd to imagine, as the
revolutionists had hitherto done, that Russian Autocracy could be
swallowed by Socialism at a gulp. There must always be periods of
transition, and it seemed that such a transition period might now be

Page 614

initiated. Liberalism might be allowed to destroy, or at least weaken,
Autocracy, and then it might be destroyed in its turn by Socialism of the
most advanced type.
Having adopted this theory of gradual historic development, some of the
more practical revolutionists approached the more advanced Liberals and
urged them to more energetic action; but before anything could be arranged
the more impatient revolutionists—notably the group called the
Narodovoltsi (National-will-ists)—intervened, denounced what they
considered an unholy alliance, and proposed a policy of terrorism by which
the Government would be frightened into a more conciliatory attitude. Their
idea was that the officials who displayed most zeal against the revolutionary
movement should be assassinated, and that every act of severity on the part
of the Administration should be answered by an act of "revolutionary
justice."
As it was evident that the choice between these two courses of action
must determine in great measure the future character and ultimate fate of
the movement, there was much discussion between the two groups; but the
question did not long remain in suspense. Soon the extreme party gained the
upper hand, and the Terrorist policy was adopted. I shall let the
revolutionists themselves explain this momentous decision. In a long
proclamation published some years later it is explained thus:
"The revolutionary movement in Russia began with the so-called 'going
in among the people.' The first Russian revolutionists thought that the
freedom of the people could be obtained only by the people itself, and they
imagined that the only thing necessary was that the people should absorb
Socialistic ideas. To this it was supposed that the peasantry were naturally
inclined, because they already possess, in the rural Commune, institutions
which contain the seeds of Socialism, and which might serve as a basis for
the reconstruction of society according to Socialist principles. The
propagandists hoped, therefore, that in the teachings of West European
Socialism the people would recognise its own instinctive creations in riper
and more clearly defined forms and that it would joyfully accept the new
teaching.
"But the people did not understand its friends, and showed itself hostile
to them. It turned out that institutions born in slavery could not serve as a
foundation for the new construction, and that the man who was yesterday a

Page 615

serf, though capable of taking part in disturbances, is not fitted for
conscious revolutionary work. With pain in their heart the revolutionists had
to confess that they were deceived in their hopes of the people. Around
them were no social revolutionary forces on which they could lean for
support, and yet they could not reconcile themselves with the existing state
of violence and slavery. Thereupon awakened a last hope—the hope of a
drowning man who clutches at a straw: a little group of heroic and self-
sacrificing individuals might accomplish with their own strength the
difficult task of freeing Russia from the yoke of autocracy. They had to do it
themselves, because there was no other means. But would they be able to
accomplish it? For them that question did not exist. The struggle of that
little group against autocracy was like the heroic means on which a doctor
decides when there is no longer any hope of the patient's recovery.
Terrorism was the only means that remained, and it had the advantage of
giving a natural vent to pent-up feelings, and of seeming a reaction against
the cruel persecutions of the Government. The party called the Narodnaya
Volya (National Will) was accordingly formed, and during several years the
world witnessed a spectacle that had never been seen before in history. The
Narodnaya Volya, insignificant in numbers but strong in spirit, engaged in
single combat with the powerful Russian Government. Neither executions,
nor imprisonment with hard labour, nor ordinary imprisonment and exile,
destroyed the energy of the revolutionists. Under their shots fell, one after
the other, the most zealous and typical representatives of arbitrary action
and violence. . . ."
It was at this time, in 1877, when propaganda and agitation among the
masses were being abandoned for the system of terrorism, but before any
assassinations had taken place, that I accidentally came into personal
relations with some prominent adherents of the revolutionary movement.
One day a young man of sympathetic appearance, whom I did not know and
who brought no credentials, called on me in St. Petersburg and suggested to
me that I might make public through the English Press what he described as
a revolting act of tyranny and cruelty committed by General Trepof, the
Prefect of the city. That official, he said, in visiting recently one of the
prisons, had noticed that a young political prisoner called Bogolubof did not
salute him as he passed, and he had ordered him to be flogged in
consequence. To this I replied that I had no reason to disbelieve the story,
but that I had equally no reason to accept it as accurate, as it rested solely

Page 616

on the evidence of a person with whom I was totally unacquainted. My
informant took the objection in good part, and offered me the names and
addresses of a number of persons who could supply me with any proofs that
I might desire.
At his next visit I told him I had seen several of the persons he had
named, and that I could not help perceiving that they were closely
connected with the revolutionary movement. I then went on to suggest that
as the sympathisers with that movement constantly complained that they
were systematically misrepresented, calumniated and caricatured, the
leaders ought to give the world an accurate account of their real doctrines,
and in this respect I should be glad to assist them. Already I knew
something of the subject, because I had many friends and acquaintances
among the sympathisers, and had often had with them interminable
discussions. With their ideas, so far as I knew them, I felt bound to confess
that I had no manner of sympathy, but I flattered myself, and he himself had
admitted, that I was capable of describing accurately and criticising
impartially doctrines with which I did not agree. My new acquaintance,
whom I may call Dimitry Ivan'itch, was pleased with the proposal, and after
he had consulted with some of his friends, we came to an agreement by
which I should receive all the materials necessary for writing an accurate
account of the doctrinal side of the movement. With regard to any
conspiracies that might be in progress, I warned him that he must be strictly
reticent, because if I came accidentally to know of any terrorist designs, I
should consider it my duty to warn the authorities. For this reason I
declined to attend any secret conclaves, and it was agreed that I should be
instructed without being initiated.
The first step in my instruction was not very satisfactory or encouraging.
One day Dimitri Ivan'itch brought me a large manuscript, which contained,
he said, the real doctrines of the revolutionists and the explanation of their
methods. I was surprised to find that it was written in English, and I
perceived at a glance that it was not at all what I wanted. As soon as I had
read the first sentence I turned to my friend and said:
"I am very sorry to find, Dimitri Ivan'itch, that you have not kept your
part of the bargain. We agreed, you may remember, that we were to act
towards each other in absolutely good faith, and here I find a flagrant bit of
bad faith in the very first sentence of the manuscript which you have

Page 617

brought me. The document opens with the statement that a large number of
students have been arrested and imprisoned for distributing books among
the people. That statement may be true according to the letter, but it is
evidently intended to mislead. These youths have been arrested, as you
must know, not for distributing ordinary books, as the memorandum
suggests, but for distributing books of a certain kind. I have read some of
them, and I cannot feel at all surprised that the Government should object to
their being put into the hands of the ignorant masses. Take, for example, the
one entitled Khitraya Mekhanika, and others of the same type. The practical
teaching they contain is that the peasants should be ready to rise and cut the
throats of the landed proprietors and officials. Now, a wholesale massacre
of the kind may or may not be desirable in the interests of Society, and
justifiable according to some new code of higher morality. That is a
question into which I do not enter. All I maintain is that the writer of this
memorandum, in speaking of 'books,' meant to mislead me."
Dimitri Ivan'itch looked puzzled and ashamed. "Forgive me," he said; "I
am to blame—not for having attempted to deceive you, but for not having
taken precautions. I have not read the manuscript, and I could not if I
wished, for it is written in English, and I know no language but my mother
tongue. My friends ought not to have done this. Give me back the paper,
and I shall take care that nothing of the sort occurs in future."
This promise was faithfully kept, and I had no further reason to
complain. Dimitri Ivan'itch gave me a considerable amount of information,
and lent me a valuable collection of revolutionary pamphlets. Unfortunately
the course of tuition was suddenly interrupted by unforeseen circumstances,
which I may mention as characteristic of life in St. Petersburg at the time.
My servant, an excellent young Russian, more honest than intelligent, came
to me one morning with a mysterious air, and warned me to be on my
guard, because there were "bad people" going about. On being pressed a
little, he explained to me what he meant. Two strangers had come to him
and, after offering him a few roubles, had asked him a number of questions
about my habits—at what hour I went out and came home, what persons
called on me, and much more of the same sort. "They even tried, sir, to get
into your sitting-room; but of course I did not allow them. I believe they
want to rob you!"

Page 618

It was not difficult to guess who these "bad people" were who took such
a keen interest in my doings, and who wanted to examine my apartment in
my absence. Any doubts I had on the subject were soon removed. On the
morrow and following days I noticed that whenever I went out, and
wherever I might walk or drive, I was closely followed by two
unsympathetic-looking individuals—so closely that when I turned round
sharp they ran into me. The first and second times this little accident
occurred they received a strong volley of unceremonious vernacular; but
when we became better acquainted we simply smiled at each other
knowingly, as the old Roman Augurs are supposed to have done when they
met in public unobserved. There was no longer any attempt at concealment
or mystification. I knew I was being shadowed, and the shadowers could
not help perceiving that I knew it. Yet, strange to say, they were never
changed!
The reader probably assumes that the secret police had somehow got
wind of my relations with the revolutionists. Such an assumption
presupposes on the part of the police an amount of intelligence and
perspicacity which they do not usually possess. On this occasion they were
on an entirely wrong scent, and the very day when I first noticed my
shadowers, a high official, who seemed to regard the whole thing as a good
joke, told me confidentially what the wrong scent was. At the instigation of
an ex-ambassador, from whom I had the misfortune to differ in matters of
foreign policy, the Moscow Gazette had denounced me publicly by name as
a person who was in the habit of visiting daily the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs—doubtless with the nefarious purpose of obtaining by illegal means
secret political information—and the police had concluded that I was a fit
and proper person to be closely watched. In reality, my relations with the
Russian Foreign Office, though inconvenient to the ex-ambassador, were
perfectly regular and above-board—sanctioned, in fact, by Prince
Gortchakoff—but the indelicate attentions of the secret police were none
the less extremely unwelcome, because some intelligent police-agent might
get onto the real scent, and cause me serious inconvenience. I determined,
therefore, to break off all relations with Dimitri Ivan'itch and his friends,
and postpone my studies to a more convenient season; but that decision did
not entirely extricate me from my difficulties. The collection of
revolutionary pamphlets was still in my possession, and I had promised to
return it. For some little time I did not see how I could keep my promise

Page 619

without compromising myself or others, but at last—after having had my
shadowers carefully shadowed in order to learn accurately their habits, and
having taken certain elaborate precautions, with which I need not trouble
the reader, as he is not likely ever to require them—I paid a visit secretly to
Dimitri Ivan'itch in his small room, almost destitute of furniture, handed
him the big parcel of pamphlets, warned him not to visit me again, and bade
him farewell. Thereupon we went our separate ways and I saw him no
more. Whether he subsequently played a leading part in the movement I
never could ascertain, because I did not know his real name; but if the
conception which I formed of his character was at all accurate, he probably
ended his career in Siberia, for he was not a man to look back after having
put his hand to the plough. That is a peculiar trait of the Russian
revolutionists of the period in question. Their passion for realising an
impossible ideal was incurable. Many of them were again and again
arrested; and as soon as they escaped or were liberated they almost
invariably went back to their revolutionary activity and worked
energetically until they again fell into the clutches of the police.
From this digression into the sphere of personal reminiscences I return
now and take up again the thread of the narrative.
We have seen how the propaganda and the agitation had failed, partly
because the masses showed themselves indifferent or hostile, and partly
because the Government adopted vigorous repressive measures. We have
seen, too, how the leaders found themselves in face of a formidable
dilemma; either they must abandon their schemes or they must attack their
persecutors. The more energetic among them, as I have already stated,
chose the latter alternative, and they proceeded at once to carry out their
policy. In the course of a single year (February, 1878, to February, 1879) a
whole series of terrorist crimes was committed; in Kief an attempt was
made on the life of the Public Prosecutor, and an officer of gendarmerie was
stabbed; in St. Petersburg the Chief of the Political Police of the Empire
(General Mezentsef) was assassinated in broad daylight in one of the central
streets, and a similar attempt was made on his successor (General
Drenteln); at Kharkof the Governor (Prince Krapotkin) was shot dead when
entering his residence. During the same period two members of the
revolutionary organisation, accused of treachery, were "executed" by order
of local Committees. In most cases the perpetrators of the crimes contrived

Page 620

to escape. One of them became well known in Western Europe as an author
under the pseudonym of Stepniak.
Terrorism had not the desired effect. On the contrary, it stimulated the
zeal and activity of the authorities, and in the course of the winter of 1878-
79 hundreds of arrests—some say as many as 2,000—were made in St.
Petersburg alone. Driven to desperation, the revolutionists still at large
decided that it was useless to assassinate mere officials; the fons et origo
mali must be reached; a blow must be struck at the Tsar himself! The first
attempt was made by a young man called Solovyoff, who fired several shots
at Alexander II. as he was walking near the Winter Palace, but none of them
took effect.
This policy of aggressive terrorism did not meet with universal approval
among the revolutionists, and it was determined to discuss the matter at a
Congress of delegates from various local circles. The meetings were held in
June, 1879, two months after Solovyoff's unsuccessful attempt, at two
provincial towns, Lipetsk and Voronezh. It was there agreed in principle to
confirm the decision of the Terrorist Narodovoltsi. As the Liberals were not
in a position to create liberal institutions or to give guarantees for political
rights, which are the essential conditions of any Socialist agitation, there
remained for the revolutionary party no other course than to destroy the
despotic autocracy. Thereupon a programme of action was prepared, and an
Executive Committee elected. From that moment, though there were still
many who preferred milder methods, the Terrorists had the upper hand, and
they at once proceeded to centralise the organisation and to introduce
stricter discipline, with greater precautions to ensure secrecy.
The Executive Committee imagined that by assassinating the Tsar
autocracy might be destroyed, and several carefully planned attempts were
made. The first plan was to wreck the train when the Imperial family were
returning to St. Petersburg from the Crimea. Mines were accordingly laid at
three separate points, but they all failed. At the last of the three points (near
Moscow) a train was blown up, but it was not the one in which the Imperial
family was travelling.
Not at all discouraged by this failure, nor by the discovery of its secret
printing-press by the police, the Executive Committee next tried to attain its
object by an explosion of dynamite in the Winter Palace when the Imperial
family were assembled at dinner. The execution was entrusted to a certain

Page 621

Halturin, one of the few revolutionists of peasant origin. As an
exceptionally clever carpenter and polisher, he easily found regular
employment in the palace, and he contrived to make a rough plan of the
building. This plan, on which the dining-hall was marked with an ominous
red cross, fell into the hands of the police, and they made what they
considered a careful investigation; but they failed to unravel the plot and
did not discover the dynamite concealed in the carpenters' sleeping quarters.
Halturin showed wonderful coolness while the search was going on, and
continued to sleep every night on the explosive, though it caused him
excruciating headaches. When he was assured by the chemist of the
Executive Committee that the quantity collected was sufficient, he exploded
the mine at the usual dinner hour, and contrived to escape uninjured.* In the
guardroom immediately above the spot where the dynamite was exploded
ten soldiers were killed and 53 wounded, and in the dining-hall the floor
was wrecked, but the Imperial family escaped in consequence of not sitting
down to dinner at the usual hour.

* After living some time in Roumania he returned to Russia
under the name of Stepanof, and in 1882 he was tried and
executed for complicity in the assassination of General
Strebnekof.

For this barbarous act the Executive Committee publicly accepted full
responsibility. In a proclamation placarded in the streets of St. Petersburg it
declared that, while regretting the death of the soldiers, it was resolved to
carry on the struggle with the Autocratic Power until the social reforms
should be entrusted to a Constituent Assembly, composed of members
freely elected and furnished with instructions from their constituents.
Finding police-repression so ineffectual, Alexander II. determined to try
the effect of conciliation, and for this purpose he placed Loris Melikof at
the head of the Government, with semi-dictatorial powers (February, 1880).
The experiment did not succeed. By the Terrorists it was regarded as "a
hypocritical Liberalism outwardly and a veiled brutality within," while in
the official world it was condemned as an act of culpable weakness on the
part of the autocracy. One consequence of it was that the Executive
Committee was encouraged to continue its efforts, and, as the police
became much less active, it was enabled to improve the revolutionary
organisation. In a circular sent to the affiliated provincial associations it
explained that the only source of legislation must be the national will,* and

Page 622

as the Government would never accept such a principle, its hand must be
forced by a great popular insurrection, for which all available forces should
be organised. The peasantry, as experience had shown, could not yet be
relied on, but efforts should be made to enrol the workmen of the towns.
Great importance was attached to propaganda in the army; but as few
conversions had been made among the rank and file, attention was to be
directed chiefly to the officers, who would be able to carry their
subordinates with them at the critical moment.

* Hence the designation Narodovoltsi (which, as we have
seen, means literally National-will-ists) adopted by this
section.

While thus recommending the scheme of destroying autocracy by means
of a popular insurrection in the distant future, the Committee had not
abandoned more expeditious methods, and it was at that moment hatching a
plot for the assassination of the Tsar. During the winter months his Majesty
was in the habit of holding on Sundays a small parade in the riding-school
near the Michael Square in St. Petersburg. On Sunday, March 3d, 1881, the
streets by which he usually returned to the Palace had been undermined at
two places, and on an alternative route several conspirators were posted
with hand-grenades concealed under their great coats. The Emperor chose
the alternative route. Here, at a signal given by Sophia Perovski, the first
grenade was thrown by a student called Ryssakoff, but it merely wounded
some members of the escort. The Emperor stopped and got out of his
sledge, and as he was making inquiries about the wounded soldiers a second
grenade was thrown by a youth called Grinevitski, with fatal effect.
Alexander II. was conveyed hurriedly to the Winter Palace, and died almost
immediately.
By this act the members of the Executive Committee proved their energy
and their talent as conspirators, but they at the same time showed their
shortsightedness and their political incapacity; for they had made no
preparations for immediately seizing the power which they so ardently
coveted—with the intention of using it, of course, entirely for the public
good. If the facts were not so well authenticated, we might dismiss the
whole story as incredible. A group of young people, certainly not more than
thirty or forty in number, without any organised material force behind them,
without any influential accomplices in the army or the official world,

Page 623

without any prospect of support from the masses, and with no plan for
immediate action after the assassination, deliberately provoked the crisis for
which they were so hopelessly unprepared. It has been suggested that they
expected the Liberals to seize the Supreme Power, but this explanation is
evidently an afterthought, because they knew that the Liberals were as
unprepared as themselves and they regarded them at that time as dangerous
rivals. Besides this, the explanation is quite irreconcilable with the
proclamation issued by the Executive Committee immediately afterwards.
The most charitable way of explaining the conduct of the conspirators is to
suppose that they were actuated more by blind hatred of the autocracy and
its agents than by political calculations of a practical kind—that they acted
simply like a wounded bull in the arena, which shuts its eyes and recklessly
charges its tormentors.
The murder of the Emperor had not at all the effect which the
Narodovoltsi anticipated. On the contrary, it destroyed their hopes of
success. Many people of liberal convictions who sympathised vaguely with
the revolutionary movement without taking part in it, and who did not
condemn very severely the attacks on police officials, were horrified when
they found that the would-be reformers did not spare even the sacred person
of the Tsar. At the same time, the police officials, who had become lax and
inefficient under the conciliatory regime of Loris Melikof, recovered their
old zeal, and displayed such inordinate activity that the revolutionary
organisation was paralysed and in great measure destroyed. Six of the
regicides were condemned to death, and five of them publicly executed,
amongst the latter Sophia Perovski, one of the most active and personally
sympathetic personages among the revolutionists. Scores of those who had
taken an active part in the movement were in prison or in exile. For a short
time the propaganda was continued among military and naval officers, and
various attempts at reorganisation, especially in the southern provinces,
were made, but they all failed. A certain Degaief, who had taken part in the
formation of military circles, turned informer, and aided the police. By his
treachery not only a considerable number of officers, but also Vera Filipof,
a young lady of remarkable ability and courage, who was the leading spirit
in the attempts at reorganisation, were arrested. There were still a number of
leaders living abroad, and from time to time they sent emissaries to revive
the propaganda, but these efforts were all fruitless. One of the active
members of the revolutionary party, Leo Deutsch, who has since published

Page 624

his Memoirs, relates how the tide of revolution ebbed rapidly at this time.
"Both in Russia and abroad," he says, "I had seen how the earlier
enthusiasm had given way to scepticism; men had lost faith, though many
of them would not allow that it was so. It was clear to me that a reaction
had set in for many years." Of the attempts to resuscitate the movement he
says: "The untried and unskilfully managed societies were run to death
before they could undertake anything definite, and the unity and
interdependence which characterised the original band of members had
disappeared." With regard to the want of unity, another prominent
revolutionist (Maslof) wrote to a friend (Dragomanof) at Geneva in 1882 in
terms of bitter complaint. He accused the Executive Committee of trying to
play the part of chief of the whole revolutionary party, and declared that its
centralising tendencies were more despotic than those of the Government.
Distributing orders among its adherents without initiating them into its
plans, it insisted on unquestioning obedience. The Socialist youth, ardent
adherents of Federalism, were indignant at this treatment, and began to
understand that the Committee used them simply as chair a canon. The
writer described in vivid colours the mutual hostility which reigned among
various fractions of the party, and which manifested itself in accusations
and even in denunciations; and he predicted that the Narodnaya Volya,
which had organised the various acts of terrorism culminating in the
assassination of the Emperor, would never develop into a powerful
revolutionary party. It had sunk into the slough of untruth, and it could only
continue to deceive the Government and the public.
In the mutual recriminations several interesting admissions were made. It
was recognised that neither the educated classes nor the common people
were capable of bringing about a revolution: the former were not numerous
enough, and the latter were devoted to the Tsar and did not sympathise with
the revolutionary movement, though they might perhaps be induced to rise
at a moment of crisis. It was considered doubtful whether such a rising was
desirable, because the masses, being insufficiently prepared, might turn
against the educated minority. In no case could a popular insurrection attain
the object which the Socialists had in view, because the power would either
remain in the hands of the Tsar—thanks to the devotion of the common
people—or it would fall into the hands of the Liberals, who would oppress
the masses worse than the autocratic Government had done. Further, it was
recognised that acts of terrorism were worse than useless, because they

Page 625

were misunderstood by the ignorant, and tended to inflame the masses
against the leaders. It seemed necessary, therefore, to return to a pacific
propaganda. Tikhomirof, who was nominally directing the movement from
abroad, became utterly discouraged, and wrote in 1884 to one of his
emissaries in Russia (Lopatin): "You now see Russia, and can convince
yourself that it does not possess the material for a vast work of
reorganisation. . . . I advise you seriously not to make superhuman efforts
and not to make a scandal in attempting the impossible. . . . If you do not
want to satisfy yourself with trifles, come away and await better times."
In examining the material relating to this period one sees clearly that the
revolutionary movement had got into a vicious circle. As pacific
propaganda had become impossible, in consequence of the opposition of the
authorities and the vigilance of the police, the Government could be
overturned only by a general insurrection; but the general insurrection could
not be prepared without pacific propaganda. As for terrorism, it had become
discredited. Tikhomirof himself came to the conclusion that the terrorist
idea was altogether a mistake, not only morally, but also from the point of
view of political expediency. A party, he explained, has either the force to
overthrow the Government, or it has not; in the former case it has no need
of political assassination, and in the latter the assassinations have no effect,
because Governments are not so stupid as to let themselves be frightened by
those who cannot overthrow them. Plainly there was nothing to be done but
to wait for better times, as he had suggested, and the better times did not
seem to be within measurable distance. He himself, after publishing a
brochure entitled "Why I Ceased to Be a Revolutionist," made his peace
with the Government, and others followed his example.* In one prison nine
made formal recantations, among them Emilianof, who held a reserve bomb
ready when Alexander II. was assassinated. Occasional acts of terrorism
showed that there was still fire under the smouldering embers, but they
were few and far between. The last serious incident of the kind during this
period was the regicide conspiracy of Sheviryoff in March, 1887. The
conspirators, carrying the bombs, were arrested in the principal street of St.
Petersburg, and five of them were hanged. The railway accident of Borki,
which happened in the following year, and in which the Imperial family had
a very narrow escape, ought perhaps to be added to the list, because there is
reason to believe that it was the work of revolutionists.

Page 626

* Tikhomirof subsequently worked against the Social
Democrats in Moscow in the interests of the Government.

By this time all the cooler heads among the revolutionists, especially
those who were living abroad in personal safety, had come to understand
that the Socialist ideal could not be attained by popular insurrection,
terrorism, or conspiracies, and consequently that further activity on the old
lines was absurd. Those of them who did not abandon the enterprise in
despair reverted to the idea that Autocratic Power, impregnable against
frontal attacks, might be destroyed by prolonged siege operations. This
change of tactics is reflected in the revolutionary literature. In 1889, for
example, the editor of the Svobodnaya Rossia declared that the aim of the
movement now was political freedom—not only as a stepping-stone to
social reorganisation, but as a good in itself. This is, he explains, the only
possible revolution at present in Russia. "For the moment there can be no
other immediate practical aim. Ulterior aims are not abandoned, but they
are not at present within reach. . . The revolutionists of the seventies and the
eighties did not succeed in creating among the peasantry or the town
workmen anything which had even the appearance of a force capable of
struggling with the Government; and the revolutionists of the future will
have no greater success until they have obtained such political rights as
personal inviolability. Our immediate aim, therefore, is a National
Assembly controlled by local self-government, and this can be brought
about only by a union of all the revolutionary forces."
There were still indications, it is true, that the old spirit of terrorism was
not yet quite extinct: Captain Zolotykhin, for example, an officer of the
Moscow secret police, was assassinated by a female revolutionist in 1890.
But such incidents were merely the last fitful sputterings of a lamp that was
going out for want of oil. In 1892 Stepniak declared it evident to all that the
professional revolutionists could not alone overthrow autocracy, however
great their energy and heroism; and he arrived at the same conclusion as the
writer just quoted. Of course, immediate success was not to be expected. "It
is only from the evolutionist's point of view that the struggle with autocracy
has a meaning. From any other standpoint it must seem a sanguinary farce
—a mere exercise in the art of self-sacrifice!" Such are the conclusions
arrived at in 1892 by a man who had been in 1878 one of the leading
terrorists, and who had with his own hand assassinated General Mezentsef,
Chief of the Political Police.

Page 627

Thus the revolutionary movement, after passing through four stages,
which I may call the academic, the propagandist, the insurrectionary, and
the terrorist, had failed to accomplish its object. One of those who had taken
an active part in it, and who, after spending two years in Siberia as a
political exile, escaped and settled in Western Europe, could write thus:
"Our revolutionary movement is dead, and we who are still alive stand by
the grave of our beautiful departed and discuss what is wanting to her. One
of us thinks that her nose should be improved; another suggests a change in
her chin or her hair. We do not notice the essential that what our beautiful
departed wants is life; that it is not a matter of hair or eyebrows, but of a
living soul, which formerly concealed all defects, and made her beautiful,
and which now has flown away. However we may invent changes and
improvements, all these things are utterly insignificant in comparison with
what is really wanting, and what we cannot give; for who can breathe a
living soul into a corpse?"
In truth, the movement which I have endeavoured to describe was at an
end; but another movement, having the same ultimate object, was coming
into existence, and it constitutes one of the essential factors of the present
situation. Some of the exiles in Switzerland and Paris had become
acquainted with the social-democratic and labour movements in Western
Europe, and they believed that the strategy and tactics employed in these
movements might be adopted in Russia. How far they have succeeded in
carrying out this policy I shall relate presently; but before entering on this
subject, I must explain how the application of such a policy had been
rendered possible by changes in the economic conditions. Russia had begun
to create rapidly a great manufacturing industry and an industrial
proletariat. This will form the subject of the next chapter.

Page 628

CHAPTER XXXVI
INDUSTRIAL PROGRESS AND THE PROLETARIAT

Russia till Lately a Peasant Empire—Early Efforts to Introduce Arts and
Crafts—Peter the Great and His Successors—Manufacturing Industry Long
Remains an Exotic—The Cotton Industry—The Reforms of Alexander II.—
Protectionists and Free Trade—Progress under High Tariffs—M. Witte's
Policy—How Capital Was Obtained—Increase of Exports—Foreign Firms
Cross the Customs Frontier—Rapid Development of Iron Industry—A
Commercial Crisis—M. Witte's Position Undermined by Agrarians and
Doctrinaires—M. Plehve a Formidable Opponent—His Apprehensions of
Revolution—Fall of M. Witte—The Industrial Proletariat.
Fifty years ago Russia was still essentially a peasant empire, living by
agriculture of a primitive type, and supplying her other wants chiefly by
home industries, as was the custom in Western Europe during the Middle
Ages.
For many generations her rulers had been trying to transplant into their
wide dominions the art and crafts of the West, but they had formidable
difficulties to contend with, and their success was not nearly as great as they
desired. We know that as far back as the fourteenth century there were
cloth-workers in Moscow, for we read in the chronicles that the workshops
of these artisans were sacked when the town was stormed by the Tartars.
Workers in metal had also appeared in some of the larger towns by that
time, but they do not seem to have risen much above the level of ordinary
blacksmiths. They were destined, however, to make more rapid progress
than other classes of artisans, because the old Tsars of Muscovy, like other
semi-barbarous potentates, admired and envied the industries of more
civilised countries mainly from the military point of view. What they
wanted most was a plentiful supply of good arms wherewith to defend
themselves and attack their neighbours, and it was to this object that their
most strenuous efforts were directed.
As early as 1475 Ivan III., the grandfather of Ivan the Terrible, sent a
delegate to Venice to seek out for him an architect who, in addition to his

Page 629

own craft, knew how to make guns; and in due course appeared in the
Kremlin a certain Muroli, called Aristotle by his contemporaries on account
of his profound learning. He undertook "to build churches and palaces, to
cast big bells and cannons, to fire off the said cannons, and to make every
sort of castings very cunningly"; and for the exercise of these various arts it
was solemnly stipulated in a formal document that he should receive the
modest salary of ten roubles monthly. With regard to the military products,
at least, the Venetian faithfully fulfilled his contract, and in a short time the
Tsar had the satisfaction of possessing a "cannon-house," subsequently
dignified with the name of "arsenal." Some of the natives learned the
foreign art, and exactly a century later (1856) a Russian, or at least a Slav,
called Tchekhof, produced a famous "Tsar-cannon," weighing as much as
96,000 lbs. The connection thus established with the mechanical arts of the
West was always afterwards maintained, and we find frequent notices of the
fact in contemporary writers. In the reign of the grandfather of Peter the
Great, for example, two paper-works were established by an Italian; and
velvet for the Tsar and his Boyars, gold brocades for ecclesiastical
vestments, and rude kinds of glass for ordinary purposes were manufactured
under the august patronage of the enlightened ruler. His son Alexis went a
good many steps further, and scandalised his God-fearing orthodox subjects
by his love of foreign heretical inventions. It was in his German suburb of
Moscow that young Peter, who was to be crowned "the Great," made his
first acquaintance with the useful arts of the West.
When the great reformer came to the throne he found in his Tsardom,
besides many workshops, some ten foundries, all of which were under
orders "to cast cannons, bombs, and bullets, and to make arms for the
service of the State." This seemed to him only a beginning, especially for
the mining and iron industry, in which he was particularly interested. By
importing foreign artificers and placing at their disposal big estates, with
numerous serfs, in the districts where minerals were plentiful, and by
carefully stipulating that these foreigners should teach his subjects well, and
conceal from them none of the secrets of the craft, he created in the Ural a
great iron industry, which still exists at the present day. Finding by
experience that State mines and State ironworks were a heavy drain on his
insufficiently replenished treasury, he transferred some of them to private
persons, and this policy was followed occasionally by his successors. Hence
the gigantic fortunes of the Demidofs and other families. The Shuvalovs,

Page 630

for example, in 1760 possessed, for the purpose of working their mines and
ironworks, no less than 33,000 serfs and a corresponding amount of land.
Unfortunately the concessions were generally given not to enterprising
business-men, but to influential court-dignitaries, who confined their
attention to squandering the revenues, and not a few of the mines and works
reverted to the Government.
The army required not only arms and ammunition, but also uniforms and
blankets. Great attention, therefore, was paid to the woollen industry from
the reign of Peter downwards. In the time of Catherine there were already
120 cloth factories, but they were on a very small scale, according to
modern conceptions. Ten factories in Moscow, for example, had amongst
them only 104 looms, 130 workers, and a yearly output for 200,000 roubles.
While thus largely influenced in its economic policy by military
considerations, the Government did not entirely neglect other branches of
manufacturing industry. Ever since Russia had pretensions to being a
civilised power its rulers have always been inclined to pay more attention to
the ornamental than the useful—to the varnish rather than the framework of
civilisation—and we need not therefore be surprised to find that long before
the native industry could supply the materials required for the ordinary
wants of humble life, attempts were made to produce such things as
Gobelin tapestries. I mention this merely as an illustration of a
characteristic trait of the national character, the influence of which may be
found in many other spheres of official activity.
If Russia did not attain the industrial level of Western Europe, it was not
from want of ambition and effort on the part of the rulers. They worked
hard, if not always wisely, for this end. Manufacturers were exempted from
rates and taxes, and even from military service, and some of them, as I have
said, received large estates from the Crown on the understanding that the
serfs should be employed as workmen. At the same time they were
protected from foreign competition by prohibitive tariffs. In a word, the
manufacturing industry was nursed and fostered in a way to satisfy the most
thorough-going protectionist, especially those branches which worked up
native raw material such as ores, flax, hemp, wool, and tallow. Occasionally
the official interference and anxiety to protect public interests went further
than the manufacturers desired. On more than one occasion the authorities
fixed the price of certain kinds of manufactured goods, and in 1754 the

Page 631

Senate, being anxious to protect the population from fires, ordered all glass
and iron works within a radius of 200 versts around Moscow to be
destroyed! In spite of such obstacles, the manufacturing industry as a whole
made considerable progress. Between 1729 and 1762 the number of
establishments officially recognised as factories rose from 26 to 335.
These results did not satisfy Catherine II., who ascended the throne in
1762. Under the influence of her friends, the French Encyclopedistes, she
imagined for a time that the official control might be relaxed, and that the
system of employing serfs in the factories and foundries might be replaced
by free labour, as in Western Europe; monopolies might be abolished, and
all liege subjects, including the peasants, might be allowed to embark in
industrial undertakings as they pleased, "for the benefit of the State and the
nation." All this looked very well on paper, but Catherine never allowed her
sentimental liberalism to injure seriously the interests of her Empire, and
she accordingly refrained from putting the laissez-faire principle largely
into practice. Though a good deal has been written about her economic
policy, it is hardly distinguishable from that of her predecessors. Like them,
she maintained high tariffs, accorded large subsidies, and even prevented
the export of raw material, in the hope that it might be worked up at home;
and when the prices in the woollen market rose very high, she compelled
the manufacturers to supply the army with cloth at a price fixed by the
authorities. In short, the old system remained practically unimpaired, and
notwithstanding the steady progress made during the reign of Nicholas I.
(1825-55), when the number of factory hands rose from 210,000 to
380,000, the manufacturing industry as a whole continued to be, until the
serfs were emancipated in 1861, a hothouse plant which could flourish only
in an officially heated atmosphere.
There was one branch of it, however, to which this remark does not
apply. The art of cotton-spinning and cotton-weaving struck deep root in
Russian soil. After remaining for generations in the condition of a cottage
industry—the yarn being distributed among the peasants and worked up by
them in their own homes—it began, about 1825, to be modernised. Though
it still required to be protected against foreign competition, it rapidly
outgrew the necessity for direct official support. Big factories driven by
steam-power were constructed, the number of hands employed rose to
110,000, and the foundations of great fortunes were laid. Strange to say,
many of the future millionaires were uneducated serfs. Sava Morozof, for

Page 632

example, who was to become one of the industrial magnates of Moscow,
was a serf belonging to a proprietor called Ryumin; most of the others were
serfs of Count Sheremetyef—the owner of a large estate on which the
industrial town of Ivanovo had sprung up—who was proud of having
millionaires among his serfs, and who never abused his authority over them.
The great movement, however, was not effected without the assistance of
foreigners. Foreign foremen were largely employed, and in the work of
organisation a leading part was played by a German called Ludwig Knoop.
Beginning life as a commercial traveller for an English firm, he soon
became a large cotton importer, and when in 1840 a feverish activity was
produced in the Russian manufacturing world by the Government's
permission to import English machines, his firm supplied these machines to
the factories on condition of obtaining a share in the business. It has been
calculated that it obtained in this way a share in no less than 122 factories,
and hence arose among the peasantry a popular saying:

"Where there is a church, there you find a pope,
And where there is a factory, there you find a Knoop."*

The biggest creation of the firm was a factory built at Narva in 1856,
with nearly half a million spindles driven by water-power.

* Gdye tserkov—tam pop;
A gdye fabrika—tam Knop.

In the second half of last century a revolution was brought about in the
manufacturing industry generally by the emancipation of the serfs, the rapid
extension of railways, the facilities for creating limited liability companies,
and by certain innovations in the financial policy of the Government. The
emancipation put on the market an unlimited supply of cheap labour; the
construction of railways in all directions increased a hundredfold the means
of communication; and the new banks and other credit institutions, aided by
an overwhelming influx of foreign capital, encouraged the foundation and
extension of industrial and commercial enterprise of every description. For
a time there was great excitement. It was commonly supposed that in all
matters relating to trade and industry Russia had suddenly jumped up to the
level of Western Europe, and many people in St. Petersburg, carried away
by the prevailing enthusiasm for liberalism in general and the doctrines of

Page 633

Free Trade in particular, were in favour of abolishing protectionism as an
antiquated restriction on liberty and an obstacle to economic progress.
At one moment the Government was disposed to yield to the current, but
it was restrained by an influential group of conservative Political
Economists, who appealed to patriotic sentiment, and by the Moscow
manufacturers, who declared that Free Trade would ruin the country. After a
little hesitation it proceeded to raise, instead of lowering, the protectionist
tariff. In 1869-76 the ad valorem duties were, on an average, under thirteen
per cent., but from that time onwards they rose steadily, until the last five
years of the century, when they averaged thirty-three per cent., and were for
some articles very much higher. In this way the Moscow industrial
magnates were protected against the influx of cheap foreign goods, but they
were not saved from foreign competition, for many foreign manufacturers,
in order to enjoy the benefit of the high duties, founded factories in Russia.
Even the firmly established cotton industry suffered from these intruders.
Industrial suburbs containing not a few cotton factories sprang up around
St. Petersburg; and a small Polish village called Lodz, near the German
frontier, grew rapidly into a prosperous town of 300,000 inhabitants, and
became a serious rival to the ancient Muscovite capital. So severely was the
competition of this young upstart felt, that the Moscow merchants
petitioned the Emperor to protect them by drawing a customs frontier round
the Polish provinces, but their petition was not granted.
Under the shelter of the high tariffs the manufacturing industry as a
whole has made rapid progress, and the cotton trade has kept well to the
front. In that branch, between 1861 and 1897, the number of hands
employed rose from 120,000 to 325,000, and the estimated value of the
products from 72 to 478 millions of roubles. In 1899 the number of spindles
was considerably over six millions, and the number of automatic weaving
machines 145,000.
The iron industry has likewise progressed rapidly, though it has not yet
outgrown the necessity for Government support, and it is not yet able to
provide for all home wants. About forty years ago it received a powerful
impulse from the discovery that in the provinces to the north of the Crimea
and the Sea of Azof there were enormous quantities of iron ore and beds of
good coal in close proximity to each other. Thanks to this discovery and to
other facts of which I shall have occasion to speak presently, this district,

Page 634

which had previously been agricultural and pastoral, has outstripped the
famous Ural region, and has become the Black Country of Russia. The vast
lonely steppe, where formerly one saw merely the peasant-farmer, the
shepherd, and the Tchumak,* driving along somnolently with his big, long-
horned, white bullocks, is now dotted over with busy industrial settlements
of mushroom growth, and great ironworks—some of them unfinished;
while at night the landscape is lit up with the lurid flames of gigantic blast-
furnaces. In this wonderful transformation, as in the history of Russian
industrial progress generally, a great part was played by foreigners. The
pioneer who did most in this district was an Englishman, John Hughes, who
began life as the son and pupil of a Welsh blacksmith, and whose sons are
now directors of the biggest of the South Russian ironworks.

* The Tchumak, a familiar figure in the songs and legends of
Little Russia, was the carrier who before the construction
of railways transported the grain to the great markets, and
brought back merchandise to the interior. He is gradually
disappearing.

Much as the South has progressed industrially in recent years, it still
remains far behind those industrial portions of the country which were
thickly settled at an earlier date. From this point of view the most important
region is the group of provinces clustering round Moscow; next comes the
St. Petersburg region, including Livonia; and thirdly Poland. As for the
various kinds of industry, the most important category is that of textile
fabrics, the second that of articles of nutrition, and the third that of ores and
metals. The total production, if we may believe certain statistical
authorities, places Russia now among the industrial nations of the world in
the fifth place, immediately after the United States, England, Germany, and
France, and a little before Austria.
The man who has in recent times carried out most energetically the
policy of protecting and fostering native industries is M. Witte, a name now
familiar to Western Europe. An avowed disciple of the great German
economist, Friedrich List, about whose works he published a brochure in
1888, he held firmly, from his youth upwards, the doctrine that "each nation
should above all things develop harmoniously its natural resources to the
highest possible degree of independence, protecting its own industries and
preferring the national aim to the pecuniary advantage of individuals." As a
corollary to this principle he declared that purely agricultural countries are

Page 635

economically backward and intellectually stagnant, being condemned to
pay tribute to the nations who have learned to work up their raw products
into more valuable commodities. The good old English doctrine that certain
countries were intended by Providence to be eternally agricultural, and that
their function in the economy of the universe is to supply raw material for
the industrial nations, was always in his eyes an abomination—an
ingenious, nefarious invention of the Manchester school, astutely invented
for the purpose of keeping the younger nations permanently in a state of
economic bondage for the benefit of English manufacturers. To emancipate
Russia from this thraldom by enabling her to create a great native industry,
sufficient to supply all her own wants, was the aim of his policy and the
constant object of his untiring efforts. Those who have had the good fortune
to know him personally must have often heard him discourse eloquently on
this theme, supporting his views by quotations from the economists of his
own school, and by illustrations drawn from the history of his own and
other countries.
A necessary condition of realising this aim was that there should be high
tariffs. These already existed, and they might be raised still higher, but in
themselves they were not enough. For the rapid development of the native
industry an enormous capital was required, and the first problem to be
solved was how this capital could be obtained. At one moment the energetic
minister conceived the project of creating a fictitious capital by inflating the
paper currency; but this idea proved unpopular. When broached in the
Council of State it encountered determined opposition. Some of the
members of that body, especially M. Bunge, who had been himself Minister
of Finance, and who remembered the evil effects of the inordinate inflation
of the currency on foreign exchanges during the Turkish War, advocated
strongly the directly opposite course—a return to gold monometallism, for
which M. Vishnegradski, M. Witte's immediate predecessor, had made
considerable preparations. Being a practical man without inveterate
prejudices, M. Witte gave up the scheme which he could not carry through,
and adopted the views of his opponents. He would introduce the gold
currency as recommended; but how was the requisite capital to be obtained?
It must be procured from abroad, somehow, and the simplest way seemed to
be to stimulate the export of native products. For this purpose the railways
were extended,* the traffic rates manipulated, and the means of transport
improved generally.

Page 636

* In 1892, when M. Witte undertook the financial
administration, there were 30,620 versts of railway, and at
the end of 1900 there were 51,288 versts.

A certain influx of gold was thus secured, but not nearly enough for the
object in view.* Some more potent means, therefore, had to be employed,
and the inventive minister evolved a new scheme. If he could only induce
foreign capitalists to undertake manufacturing industries in Russia, they
would, at one and the same time, bring into the country the capital required,
and they would cooperate powerfully in that development of the national
industry which he so ardently wished. No sooner had he roughly sketched
out his plan—for he was not a man to let the grass grow under his feet—
than he set himself to put it into execution by letting it be known in the
financial world that the Government was ready to open a great field for
lucrative investments, in the form of profitable enterprises under the control
of those who subscribed the capital.

* In 1891 the total value of the exports was roughly
70,000,000 pounds. It then fell, in consequence of bad
harvests, to 45 millions, and did not recover the previous
maximum until 1897, when it stood at 73 millions.
Thereafter there was a steady rise till 1901, when the total
was estimated at 76 millions.

Foreign capitalists responded warmly to the call. Crowds of concession-
hunters, projectors, company promoters, et hoc genus omne, collected in St.
Petersburg, offering their services on the most tempting terms; and all of
them who could make out a plausible case were well received at the
Ministry of Finance. It was there explained to them that in many branches
of industry, such as the manufacture of textile fabrics, there was little or no
room for newcomers, but that in others the prospects were most brilliant.
Take, for example, the iron industries of Southern Russia. The boundless
mineral wealth of that region was still almost intact, and the few works
which had been there established were paying very large dividends. The
works founded by John Hughes, for example, had repeatedly divided
considerably over twenty per cent., and there was little fear for the future,
because the Government had embarked on a great scheme of railway
extension, requiring an unlimited amount of rails and rolling-stock. What
better opening could be desired? Certainly the opening seemed most
attractive, and into it rushed the crowd of company promoters, followed by
stock-jobbers and brokers, playing lively pieces of what the Germans call

Page 637

Zukunftsmusik. An unwary and confiding public, especially in Belgium and
France, listened to the enchanting strains of the financial syrens, and
invested largely. Quickly the number of completed ironworks in that region
rose from nine to seventeen, and in the short space of three years the output
of pig-iron was nearly doubled. In 1900 there were 44 blast furnaces in
working order, and ten more were in course of construction. And all this
time the Imperial revenue increased by leaps and bounds, so that the
introduction of the gold currency was effected without difficulty. M. Witte
was declared to be the greatest minister of his time—a Russian Colbert or
Turgot, or perhaps the two rolled into one.
Then came a change. Competition and over-production led naturally to a
fall in prices, and at the same time the demand decreased, because the
railway-building activity of the Government slackened. Alarmed at this
state of things, the banks which had helped to start and foster the huge and
costly enterprises contracted their credits. By the end of 1899 the
disenchantment was general and widespread. Some of the companies were
so weighted by the preliminary financial obligations, and had conducted
their affairs in such careless, reckless fashion, that they had soon to shut
down their mines and close their works. Even solid undertakings suffered.
The shares of the Briansk works, for example, which had given dividends
as high as 30 per cent., fell from 500 to 230. The Mamontof companies—
supposed to be one of the strongest financial groups in the country—had to
suspend payment, and numerous other failures occurred. Nearly all the
commercial banks, having directly participated in the industrial concerns,
were rudely shaken. M. Witte, who had been for a time the idol of a certain
section of the financial world, became very unpopular, and was accused of
misleading the investing public. Among the accusations brought against
him some at least could easily be refuted. He may have made mistakes in
his policy, and may have been himself over-sanguine, but surely, as he
subsequently replied to his accusers, it was no part of his duty to warn
company promoters and directors that they should refrain from over-
production, and that their enterprises might not be as remunerative as they
expected. As to whether there is any truth in the assertion that he held out
prospects of larger Government orders than he actually gave, I cannot say.
That he cut down prices, and showed himself a hard man to deal with, there
seems no doubt.

Page 638

The reader may naturally be inclined to jump to the conclusion that the
commercial crisis just referred to was the cause of M. Witte's fall. Such a
conclusion would be entirely erroneous. The crisis happened in the winter
of 1899-1900, and M. Witte remained Finance Minister until the autumn of
1903. His fall was the result of causes of a totally different kind, and these I
propose now to explain, because the explanation will throw light on certain
very curious and characteristic conceptions at present current in the Russian
educated classes.
Of course there were certain causes of a purely personal kind, but I shall
dismiss them in a very few words. I remember once asking a well-informed
friend of M. Witte's what he thought of him as an administrator and a
statesman. The friend replied: "Imagine a negro of the Gold Coast let loose
in modern European civilisation!" This reply, like most epigrammatic
remarks, is a piece of gross exaggeration, but it has a modicum of truth in it.
In the eyes of well-trained Russian officials M. Witte was a titanic, reckless
character, capable at any moment of playing the part of the bull in the
china-shop. As a masterful person, brusque in manner and incapable of
brooking contradiction, he had made for himself many enemies; and his
restless, irrepressible energy had led him to encroach on the provinces of all
his colleagues. Possessing as he did the control of the purse, his interference
could not easily be resisted. The Ministers of Interior, War, Agriculture,
Public Works, Public Instruction, and Foreign Affairs had all occasion to
complain of his incursions into their departments. In contrast to his
colleagues, he was not only extremely energetic, but he was ever ready to
assume an astounding amount of responsibility; and as he was something of
an opportunist, he was perhaps not always quixotically scrupulous in the
choice of expedients for attaining his ends.
Altogether M. Witte was an inconvenient personage in an administration
in which strong personality is regarded as entirely out of place, and in
which personal initiative is supposed to reside exclusively in the Tsar. In
addition to all this he was a man who felt keenly, and when he was irritated
he did not always keep the unruly member under strict control. If I am
correctly informed, it was some imprudent and not very respectful remarks,
repeated by a subordinate and transmitted by a Grand Duke to the Tsar,
which were the immediate cause of his transfer from the influential post of
Minister of Finance to the ornamental position of President of the Council
of Ministers; but that was merely the proverbial last straw that broke the

Page 639

camel's back. His position was already undermined, and it is the
undermining process which I wish to describe.
The first to work for his overthrow were the Agrarian Conservatives.
They could not deny that, from the purely fiscal point of view, his
administration was a marvellous success; for he was rapidly doubling the
revenue, and he had succeeded in replacing the fluctuating depreciated
paper currency by a gold coinage; but they maintained that he was killing
the goose that laid the golden eggs. Evidently the tax-paying power of the
rural classes was being overstrained, for they were falling more and more
into arrears in the payment of their taxes, and their impoverishment was
yearly increasing. All their reserves had been exhausted, as was shown by
the famines of 1891-92, when the Government had to spend hundreds of
millions to feed them. Whilst the land was losing its fertility, those who had
to live by it were increasing in numbers at an alarming rate. Already in
some districts one-fifth of the peasant households had no longer any land of
their own, and of those who still possessed land a large proportion had no
longer the cattle and horses necessary to till and manure their allotments.
No doubt M. Witte was beginning to perceive his mistake, and had done
something to palliate the evils by improving the system of collecting the
taxes and abolishing the duty on passports, but such merely palliative
remedies could have little effect. While a few capitalists were amassing
gigantic fortunes, the masses were slowly and surely advancing to the brink
of starvation. The welfare of the agriculturists, who constitute nine-tenths of
the whole population, was being ruthlessly sacrificed, and for what? For the
creation of a manufacturing industry which rested on an artificial,
precarious basis, and which had already begun to decline.
So far the Agrarians, who champion the interests of the agricultural
classes. Their views were confirmed and their arguments strengthened by
an influential group of men whom I may call, for want of a better name, the
philosophers or doctrinaire interpreters of history, who have, strange to say,
more influence in Russia than in any other country.
The Russian educated classes desire that the nation should be wealthy
and self-supporting, and they recognise that for this purpose a large
manufacturing industry is required; but they are reluctant to make the
sacrifices necessary to attain the object in view, and they imagine that,
somehow or other, these sacrifices may be avoided. Sympathising with this

Page 640

frame of mind, the doctrinaires explain that the rich and prosperous
countries of Europe and America obtained their wealth and prosperity by
so-called "Capitalism"—that is to say, by a peculiar social organisation in
which the two main factors are a small body of rich capitalists and
manufacturers and an enormous pauper proletariat living from hand to
mouth, at the mercy of the heartless employers of labour. Russia has lately
followed in the footsteps of those wealthy countries, and if she continues to
do so she will inevitably be saddled with the same disastrous results—
plutocracy, pauperism, unrestrained competition in all spheres of activity,
and a greatly intensified struggle for life, in which the weaker will
necessarily go to the wall.*

* Free competition in all spheres of activity, leading to
social inequality, plutocracy, and pauperism, is the
favourite bugbear of Russian theorists; and who is not a
theorist in Russia? The fact indicates the prevalence of
Socialist ideas in the educated classes.

Happily there is, according to these theorists, a more excellent way, and
Russia can adopt it if she only remains true to certain mysterious principles
of her past historic development. Without attempting to expound those
mysterious principles, to which I have repeatedly referred in previous
chapters, I may mention briefly that the traditional patriarchal institutions
on which the theorists found their hopes of a happy social future for their
country are the rural Commune, the native home-industries, and the
peculiar co-operative institutions called Artels. How these remnants of a
semi-patriarchal state of society are to be practically developed in such a
way as to withstand the competition of manufacturing industry organised on
modern "capitalist" lines, no one has hitherto been able to explain
satisfactorily, but many people indulge in ingenious speculations on the
subject, like children planning the means of diverting with their little toy
spades a formidable inundation. In my humble opinion, the whole theory is
a delusion; but it is held firmly—I might almost say fanatically—by those
who, in opposition to the indiscriminate admirers of West-European and
American civilisation, consider themselves genuine Russians and
exceptionally good patriots. M. Witte has never belonged to that class. He
believes that there is only one road to national prosperity—the road by
which Western Europe has travelled—and along this road he tried to drive
his country as rapidly as possible. He threw himself, therefore, heart and

Page 641

soul into what his opponents call "Capitalism," by raising State loans,
organising banks and other credit institutions, encouraging the creation and
extension of big factories, which must inevitably destroy the home industry,
and even—horribile dictu!—undermining the rural Commune, and thereby
adding to the ranks of the landless proletariat, in order to increase the
amount of cheap labour for the benefit of the capitalists.
With the arguments thus supplied by Agrarians and doctrinaires, quite
honest and well-meaning, according to their lights, it was easy to sap M.
Witte's position. Among his opponents, the most formidable was the late M.
Plehve, Minister of Interior—a man of a totally different stamp. A few
months before his tragic end I had a long and interesting conversation with
him, and I came away deeply impressed. Having repeatedly had
conversations of a similar kind with M. Witte, I could compare, or rather
contrast, the two men. Both of them evidently possessed an exceptional
amount of mental power and energy, but in the one it was volcanic, and in
the other it was concentrated and thoroughly under control. In discussion,
the one reminded me of the self-taught, slashing swordsman; the other of
the dexterous fencer, carefully trained in the use of the foils, who never
launches out beyond the point at which he can quickly recover himself. As
to whether M. Plehve was anything more than a bold, energetic, clever
official there may be differences of opinion, but he certainly could assume
the airs of a profound and polished statesman, capable of looking at things
from a much higher point of view than the ordinary tchinovnik, and he had
the talent of tacitly suggesting that a great deal of genuine, enlightened
statesmanship lay hidden under the smooth surface of his cautious reserve.
Once or twice I could perceive that when criticising the present state of
things he had his volcanic colleague in his mind's eye; but the covert
allusions were so vague and so carefully worded that the said colleague, if
he had been present, would hardly have been justified in entering a personal
protest. A statesman of the higher type, I was made to feel, should deal not
with personalities, but with things, and it would be altogether unbecoming
to complain of a colleague in presence of an outsider. Thus his attitude
towards his opponent was most correct, but it was not difficult to infer that
he had little sympathy with the policy of the Ministry of Finance.
From other sources I learned the cause of this want of sympathy. Being
Minister of Interior, and having served long in the Police Department, M.
Plehve considered that his first duty was the maintenance of public order

Page 642

and the protection of the person and autocracy of his august master. He was
therefore the determined enemy of revolutionary tendencies, in whatever
garb or disguise they might appear; and as a statesman he had to direct his
attention to everything likely to increase those tendencies in the future.
Now it seemed that in the financial policy which had been followed for
some years there were germs of future revolutionary fermentation. The
peasantry were becoming impoverished, and were therefore more likely to
listen to the insidious suggestions of Socialist agitators; and already
agrarian disturbances had occurred in the provinces of Kharkof and Poltava.
The industrial proletariat which was being rapidly created was being
secretly organised by the revolutionary Social Democrats, and already there
had been serious labour troubles in some of the large towns. For any future
revolutionary movement the proletariat would naturally supply recruits.
Then, at the other end of the social scale, a class of rich capitalists was
being created, and everybody who has read a little history knows that a rich
and powerful tiers etat cannot be permanently conciliated with autocracy.
Though himself neither an agrarian nor a Slavophil doctrinaire, M. Plehve
could not but have a certain sympathy with those who were forging
thunderbolts for the official annihilation of M. Witte. He was too practical a
man to imagine that the hands on the dial of economic progress could be set
back and a return made to moribund patriarchal institutions; but he thought
that at least the pace might be moderated. The Minister of Finance need not
be in such a desperate, reckless hurry, and it was desirable to create
conservative forces which might counteract the revolutionary forces which
his impulsive colleague was inadvertently calling into existence.
Some of the forgers of thunderbolts went a great deal further, and
asserted or insinuated that M. Witte was himself consciously a revolutionist,
with secret, malevolent intentions. In support of their insinuations they cited
certain cases in which well-known Socialists had been appointed professors
in academies under the control of the Ministry of Finance, and they pointed
to the Peasant Bank, which enjoyed M. Witte's special protection. At first it
had been supposed that the bank would have an anti-revolutionary influence
by preventing the formation of a landless proletariat and increasing the
number of small land-owners, who are always and everywhere conservative
so far as the rights of private property are concerned.
Unfortunately its success roused the fears of the more conservative
section of the landed proprietors. These gentlemen, as I have already

Page 643

mentioned, pointed out that the estates of the nobles were rapidly passing
into the hands of the peasantry, and that if this process were allowed to
continue the hereditary Noblesse, which had always been the civilising
element in the rural population, and the surest support of the throne, would
drift into the towns and there sink into poverty or amalgamate with the
commercial plutocracy, and help to form a tiers etat which would be hostile
to the Autocratic Power.
In these circumstances it was evident that the headstrong Minister of
Finance could maintain his position only so long as he enjoyed the energetic
support of the Emperor, and this support, for reasons which I have indicated
above, failed him at the critical moment. When his work was still
unfinished he was suddenly compelled, by the Emperor's command, to
relinquish his post and accept a position in which, it was supposed, he
would cease to have any influence in the administration.
Thus fell the Russian Colbert-Turgot, or whatever else he may be called.
Whether financial difficulties in the future will lead to his reinstatement as
Minister of Finance remains to be seen; but in any case his work cannot be
undone. He has increased manufacturing industry to an unprecedented
extent, and, as M. Plehve perceived, the industrial proletariat which
manufacturing industry on capitalist lines always creates has provided a
new field of activity for the revolutionists. I return, therefore, to the
evolution of the revolutionary movement in order to describe its present
phase, the first-fruits of which have been revealed in the labour
disturbances in St. Petersburg and other industrial centres.

Page 644

Page 645

CHAPTER XXXVII
THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT IN ITS LATEST
PHASE

Influence of Capitalism and Proletariat on the Revolutionary Movement
—What is to be Done?—Reply of Plekhanof—A New Departure—Karl
Marx's Theories Applied to Russia—Beginnings of a Social Democratic
Movement—The Labour Troubles of 1894-96 in St. Petersburg—The
Social Democrats' Plan of Campaign—Schism in the Party—Trade-
unionism and Political Agitation—The Labour Troubles of 1902—How the
Revolutionary Groups are Differentiated from Each Other—Social
Democracy and Constitutionalism—Terrorism—The Socialist
Revolutionaries—The Militant Organisation—Attitude of the Government
—Factory Legislation—Government's Scheme for Undermining Social
Democracy—Father Gapon and His Labour Association—The Great Strike
in St. Petersburg—Father Gapon goes over to the Revolutionaries.
The development of manufacturing industry on capitalist lines, and the
consequent formation of a large industrial proletariat, produced great
disappointment in all the theorising sections of the educated classes. The
thousands of men and women who had, since the accession of the Tsar-
Emancipator in 1855, taken a keen, enthusiastic interest in the progress of
their native country, all had believed firmly that in some way or other
Russia would escape "the festering sores of Western civilisation." Now
experience had proved that the belief was an illusion, and those who had
tried to check the natural course of industrial progress were constrained to
confess that their efforts had been futile. Big factories were increasing in
size and numbers, while cottage industries were disappearing or falling
under the power of middlemen, and the Artels had not advanced a step in
their expected development. The factory workers, though all of peasant
origin, were losing their connection with their native villages and
abandoning their allotments of the Communal land. They were becoming,
in short, a hereditary caste in the town population, and the pleasant
Slavophil dream of every factory worker having a house in the country was

Page 646

being rudely dispelled. Nor was there any prospect of a change for the
better in the future. With the increase of competition among the
manufacturers, the uprooting of the muzhik from the soil must go on more
and more rapidly, because employers must insist more and more on having
thoroughly trained operatives ready to work steadily all the year round.
This state of things had a curious effect on the course of the revolutionary
movement.
Let me recall very briefly the successive stages through which the
movement had already passed. It had been inaugurated, as we have seen, by
the Nihilists, the ardent young representatives of a "storm-and-stress"
period, in which the venerable traditions and respected principles of the past
were rejected and ridiculed, and the newest ideas of Western Europe were
eagerly adopted and distorted. Like the majority of their educated
countrymen, they believed that in the race of progress Russia was about to
overtake and surpass the nations of the West, and that this desirable result
was to be attained by making a tabula rasa of existing institutions, and
reconstructing society according to the plans of Proudhon, Fourier, and the
other writers of the early Socialist school.
When the Nihilists had expended their energies and exhausted the
patience of the public in theorising, talking, and writing, a party of action
came upon the scene. Like the Nihilists, they desired political, social, and
economic reforms of the most thorough-going kind, but they believed that
such things could not be effected by the educated classes alone, and they
determined to call in the co-operation of the people. For this purpose they
tried to convert the masses to the gospel of Socialism. Hundreds of them
became missionaries and "went in among the people." But the gospel of
Socialism proved unintelligible to the uneducated, and the more ardent,
incautious missionaries fell into the hands of the police. Those of them who
escaped, perceiving the error of their ways, but still clinging to the hope of
bringing about a political, social, and economic revolution, determined to
change their tactics. The emancipated serf had shown himself incapable of
"prolonged revolutionary activity," but there was reason to believe that he
was, like his forefathers in the time of Stenka Razin and Pugatcheff, capable
of rising and murdering his oppressors. He must be used, therefore, for the
destruction of the Autocratic Power and the bureaucracy, and then it would

Page 647

be easy to reorganise society on a basis of universal equality, and to take
permanent precautions against capitalism and the creation of a proletariat.
The hopes of the agitators proved as delusive as those of the
propagandists. The muzhik turned a deaf ear to their instigations, and the
police soon prevented their further activity. Thus the would-be root-and-
branch reforms found themselves in a dilemma. Either they must abandon
their schemes for the moment or they must strike immediately at their
persecutors. They chose, as we have seen, the latter alternative, and after
vain attempts to frighten the Government by acts of terrorism against
zealous officials, they assassinated the Tsar himself; but before they had
time to think of the constructive part of their task, their organisation was
destroyed by the Autocratic Power and the bureaucracy, and those of them
who escaped arrest had to seek safety in emigration to Switzerland and
Paris.
Then arose, all along the line of the defeated, decimated revolutionists,
the cry, "What is to be done?" Some replied that the shattered organisation
should be reconstructed, and a number of secret agents were sent
successively from Switzerland for this purpose. But their efforts, as they
themselves confessed, were fruitless, and despondency seemed to be
settling down permanently on all, except a few fanatics, when a voice was
heard calling on the fugitives to rally round a new banner and carry on the
struggle by entirely new methods. The voice came from a revolutionologist
(if I may use such a term) of remarkable talent, called M. Plekhanof, who
had settled in Geneva with a little circle of friends, calling themselves the
"Labour Emancipation Group." His views were expounded in a series of
interesting publications, the first of which was a brochure entitled
"Socialism and the Political Struggle," published in 1883.
According to M. Plekhanof and his group the revolutionary movement
had been conducted up to that moment on altogether wrong lines. All
previous revolutionary groups had acted on the assumption that the political
revolution and the economic reorganisation of society must be effected
simultaneously, and consequently they had rejected contemptuously all
proposals for reforms, however radical, of a merely political kind. These
had been considered, as I have mentioned in a previous chapter, not only as
worthless, but as positively prejudicial to the interests of the working
classes, because so-called political liberties and parliamentary government

Page 648

would be sure to consolidate the domination of the bourgeoisie. That such
has generally been the immediate effect of parliamentary institutions is
undeniable, but it did not follow that the creation of such institutions should
be opposed. On the contrary, they ought to be welcomed, not merely
because, as some revolutionists had already pointed out, propaganda and
agitation could be more easily carried on under a constitutional regime, but
because constitutionalism is certainly the most convenient, and perhaps the
only, road by which the socialistic ideal can ultimately be attained. This is a
dark saying, but it will become clearer when I have explained, according to
the new apostles, a second error into which their predecessors had fallen.
That second error was the assumption that all true friends of the people,
whether Conservatives, Liberals, or revolutionaries, ought to oppose to the
utmost the development of capitalism. In the light of Karl Marx's
discoveries in economic science every one must recognise this to be an
egregious mistake. That great authority, it was said, had proved that the
development of capitalism was irresistible, and his conclusions had been
confirmed by the recent history of Russia, for all the economic progress
made during the last half century had been on capitalist lines.
Even if it were possible to arrest the capitalist movement, it is not
desirable from the revolutionary point of view. In support of this thesis Karl
Marx is again cited. He has shown that capitalism, though an evil in itself,
is a necessary stage of economic and social progress. At first it is prejudicial
to the interests of the working classes, but in the long run it benefits them,
because the ever-growing proletariat must, whether it desires it or not,
become a political party, and as a political party it must one day break the
domination of the bourgeoisie. As soon as it has obtained the predominant
political power, it will confiscate, for the public good, the instruments of
production—factories, foundries, machines, etc.—by expropriating the
capitalist. In this way all the profits which accrue from production on a
large scale, and which at present go into the pockets of the capitalists, will
be distributed equally among the workmen.
Thus began a new phase of the revolutionary movement, and, like all
previous phases, it remained for some years in the academic stage, during
which there were endless discussions on theoretical and practical questions.
Lavroff, the prophet of the old propaganda, treated the new ideas "with
grandfatherly severity," and Tikhomirof, the leading representative of the

Page 649

moribund Narodnaya Volya, which had prepared the acts of terrorism,
maintained stoutly that the West European methods recommended by
Plekhanof were inapplicable to Russia. The Plekhanof group replied in a
long series of publications, partly original and partly translations from Marx
and Engels, explaining the doctrines and aims of the Social Democrats.
Seven years were spent in this academic literary activity—a period of
comparative repose for the Russian secret police—and about 1890 the
propagandists of the new school began to work cautiously in St. Petersburg.
At first they confined themselves to forming little secret circles for making
converts, and they found that the ground had been to some extent prepared
for the seed which they had to sow. The workmen were discontented, and
some of the more intelligent amongst them who had formerly been in touch
with the propagandists of the older generation had learned that there was an
ingenious and effective means of getting their grievances redressed. How
was that possible? By combination and strikes. For the uneducated workers
this was an important discovery, and they soon began to put the suggested
remedy to a practical test. In the autumn of 1894 labour troubles broke out
in the Nevski engineering works and the arsenal, and in the following year
in the Thornton factory and the cigarette works. In all these strikes the
Social Democratic agents took part behind the scenes. Avoiding the main
errors of the old propagandists, who had offered the workmen merely
abstract Socialist theories which no uneducated person could reasonably be
expected to understand, they adopted a more rational method. Though
impervious to abstract theories, the Russian workman is not at all insensible
to the prospect of bettering his material condition and getting his everyday
grievances redressed. Of these grievances the ones he felt most keenly were
the long hours, the low wages, the fines arbitrarily imposed by the
managers, and the brutal severity of the foreman. By helping him to have
these grievances removed the Social Democratic agents might gain his
confidence, and when they had come to be regarded by him as his real
friends they might widen his sympathies and teach him to feel that his
personal interests were identical with the interests of the working classes as
a whole. In this way it would be possible to awaken in the industrial
proletariat generally a sort of esprit de corps, which is the first condition of
political organisation.
On these lines the agents set to work. Having formed themselves into a
secret association called the "Union for the Emancipation of the Working

Page 650

Classes," they gradually abandoned the narrow limits of coterie-
propaganda, and prepared the way for agitation on a larger scale. Among
the discontented workmen they distributed a large number of carefully
written tracts, in which the material grievances were formulated, and the
whole political system, with its police, gendarmes, Cossacks, and tax-
gathers, was criticised in no friendly spirit, but without violent language. In
introducing into the programme this political element, great caution had to
be exercised, because the workmen did not yet perceive clearly any close
connection between their grievances and the existing political institutions,
and those of them who belonged to the older generation regarded the Tsar
as the incarnation of disinterested benevolence. Bearing this in mind, the
Union circulated a pamphlet for the enlightenment of the labouring
population, in which the writer refrained from all reference to the
Autocratic Power, and described simply the condition of the labouring
classes, the heavy burdens they had to bear, the abuses of which they were
the victims, and the inconsiderate way in which they were treated by their
employers. This pamphlet was eagerly read, and from that moment
whenever labour troubles arose the men applied to the Social Democratic
agents to assist them in formulating their grievances.
Of course, the assistance had to be given secretly, because there were
always police spies in the factories, and all persons suspected of aiding the
labour movement were liable to be arrested and exiled. In spite of this
danger the work was carried on with great energy, and in the summer of
1896 the field of operations was extended. During the coronation
ceremonies of that year the factories and workshops in St. Petersburg were
closed, and the men considered that for these days they ought to receive
wages as usual. When their demand was refused, 40,000 of them went out
on strike. The Social Democratic Union seized the opportunity and
distributed tracts in large quantities. For the first time such tracts were read
aloud at workmen's meetings and applauded by the audience. The Union
encouraged the workmen in their resistance, but advised them to refrain
from violence, so as not to provoke the intervention of the police and the
military, as they had imprudently done on some previous occasions. When
the police did intervene and expelled some of the strike-leaders from St.
Petersburg, the agitators had an excellent opportunity of explaining that the
authorities were the protectors of the employers and the enemies of the
working classes. These explanations counteracted the effect of an official

Page 651

proclamation to the workmen, in which M. Witte tried to convince them
that the Tsar was constantly striving to improve their condition. The
struggle was decided, not by arguments and exhortations, but by a more
potent force; having no funds for continuing the strike, the men were
compelled by starvation to resume work.
This is the point at which the labour movement began to be conducted on
a large scale and by more systematic methods. In the earlier labour troubles
the strikers had not understood that the best means of bringing pressure on
employers was simply to refuse to work, and they had often proceeded to
show their dissatisfaction by ruthlessly destroying their employers' property.
This had brought the police, and sometimes the military, on the scene, and
numerous arrests had followed. Another mistake made by the inexperienced
strikers was that they had neglected to create a reserve fund from which
they could draw the means of subsistence when they no longer received
wages and could no longer obtain credit at the factory provision store.
Efforts were now made to correct these two mistakes, and with regard to the
former they were fairly successful, for wanton destruction of property
ceased to be a prominent feature of labour troubles; but strong reserve funds
have not yet been created, so that the strikes have never been of long
duration.
Though the strikes had led, so far, to no great practical, tangible results,
the new ideas and aspirations were spreading rapidly in the factories and
workshops, and they had already struck such deep root that some of the
genuine workmen wished to have a voice in the managing committee of the
Union, which was composed exclusively of educated men. When a request
to that effect was rejected by the committee a lengthy discussion took place,
and it soon became evident that underneath the question of organisation lay
a most important question of principle. The workmen wished to concentrate
their efforts on the improvement of their material condition, and to proceed
on what we should call trade-unionist lines, whereas the committee wished
them to aim also at the acquisition of political rights. Great determination
was shown on both sides. An attempt of the workmen to maintain a secret
organ of their own with the view of emancipating themselves from the
"Politicals" ended in failure; but they received sympathy and support from
some of the educated members of the party, and in this way a schism took
place in the Social Democrat camp. After repeated ineffectual attempts to
find a satisfactory compromise, the question was submitted to a Congress

Page 652

which was held in Switzerland in 1900; but the discussions merely
accentuated the differences of opinion, and the two parties constituted
themselves into separate independent groups. The one under the leadership
of Plekhanof, and calling itself the Revolutionary Social Democrats, held to
the Marx doctrines in all their extent and purity, and maintained the
necessity of constant agitation in the political sense. The other, calling itself
the Union of Foreign Social Democrats, inclined to the trade-unionism
programme, and proclaimed the necessity of being guided by political
expediency rather than inflexible dogmas. Between the two a wordy
warfare was carried on for some time in pedantic, technical language; but
though habitually brandishing their weapons and denouncing their
antagonists in true Homeric style, they were really allies, struggling towards
a common end—two sections of the Social Democratic party differing from
each other on questions of tactics.
The two divergent tendencies have often reappeared in the subsequent
history of the movement. During ordinary peaceful times the economic or
trade-unionist tendency can generally hold its own, but as soon as
disturbances occur and the authorities have to intervene, the political
current quickly gains the upper hand. This was exemplified in the labour
troubles which took place at Rostoff-on-the-Don in 1902. During the first
two days of the strike the economic demands alone were put forward, and
in the speeches which were delivered at the meetings of workmen no
reference was made to political grievances. On the third day one orator
ventured to speak disrespectfully of the Autocratic Power, but he thereby
provoked signs of dissatisfaction in the audiences. On the fifth and
following days, however, several political speeches were made, ending with
the cry of "Down with Tsarism!" and a crowd of 30,000 workmen agreed
with the speakers. Thereafter occurred similar strikes in Odessa, the
Caucasus, Kief, and Central Russia, and they had all a political rather than a
purely economic character.
I must now endeavour to explain clearly the point of view and plan of
campaign of this new movement, which I may call the revolutionary
Renaissance.
The ultimate aim of the new reformers was the same as that of all their
predecessors—the thorough reorganisation of Society on Socialistic
principles. According to their doctrines, Society as at present constituted

Page 653

consists of two great classes, called variously the exploiters and the
exploited, the shearers and the shorn, the capitalists and the workers, the
employers and the employed, the tyrants and the oppressed; and this
unsatisfactory state of things must go on so long as the so-called bourgeois
or capitalist regime continues to exist. In the new heaven and the new earth
of which the Socialist dreams this unjust distinction is to disappear; all
human beings are to be equally free and independent, all are to cooperate
spontaneously with brains and hands to the common good, and all are to
enjoy in equal shares the natural and artificial good things of this life.
So far there has never been any difference of opinion among the various
groups of Russian thorough-going revolutionists. All of them, from the
antiquated Nihilist down to the Social Democrat of the latest type, have
held these views. What has differentiated them from each other is the
greater or less degree of impatience to realise the ideal.
The most impatient were the Anarchists, who grouped themselves around
Bakunin. They wished to overthrow immediately by a frontal attack all
existing forms of government and social organisation, in the hope that
chance, or evolution, or natural instinct, or sudden inspiration or some other
mysterious force, would create something better. They themselves declined
to aid this mysterious force even by suggestions, on the ground that, as one
of them has said, "to construct is not the business of the generation whose
duty is to destroy." Notwithstanding the strong impulsive element in the
national character, the reckless, ultra-impatient doctrinaires never became
numerous, and never succeeded in forming an organised group, probably
because the young generation in Russia were too much occupied with the
actual and future condition of their own country to embark on schemes of
cosmopolitan anarchism such as Bakunin recommended.
Next in the scale of impatience came the group of believers in Socialist
agitation among the masses, with a view to overturning the existing
Government and putting themselves in its place as soon as the masses were
sufficiently organised to play the part destined for them. Between them and
the Anarchists the essential points of difference were that they admitted the
necessity of some years of preparation, and they intended, when the
Government was overturned, not to preserve indefinitely the state of
anarchy, but to put in the place of autocracy, limited monarchy, or the
republic, a strong, despotic Government thoroughly imbued with Socialistic

Page 654

principles. As soon as it had laid firmly the foundations of the new order of
things it was to call a National Assembly, from which it was to receive, I
presume, a bill of indemnity for the benevolent tyranny which it had
temporarily exercised.
Impatience a few degrees less intense produced the next group, the
partisans of pacific Socialist propaganda. They maintained that there was no
necessity for overthrowing the old order of things till the masses had been
intellectually prepared for the new, and they objected to the foundation of
the new regime being laid by despots, however well-intentioned in the
Socialist sense. The people must be made happy and preserved in a state of
happiness by the people themselves.
In the last place came the least impatient of all, the Social Democrats,
who differ widely from all the preceding categories.
All previous revolutionary groups had systematically rejected the idea of
a gradual transition from the bourgeois to the Socialist regime. They would
not listen to any suggestion about a constitutional monarchy or a democratic
republic even as a mere intermediate stage of social development. All such
things, as part and parcel of the bourgeois system, were anathematised.
There must be no half-way houses between present misery and future
happiness; for many weary travellers might be tempted to settle there in the
desert, and fail to reach the promised land. "Ever onward" should be the
watchword, and no time should be wasted on the foolish struggles of
political parties and the empty vanities of political life.
Not thus thought the Social Democrat. He was much wiser in his
generation. Having seen how the attempts of the impatient groups had
ended in disaster, and knowing that, if they had succeeded, the old effete
despotism would probably have been replaced by a young, vigorous one
more objectionable than its predecessor, he determined to try a more
circuitous but surer road to the goal which the impatient people had in view.
In his opinion the distance from the present Russian regime protected by
autocracy to the future Socialist paradise was far too great to be traversed in
a single stage, and he knew of one or two comfortable rest-houses on the
way. First there was the rest-house of Constitutionalism, with parliamentary
institutions. For some years the bourgeoisie would doubtless have a
parliamentary majority, but gradually, by persistent effort, the Fourth Estate
would gain the upper hand, and then the Socialist millennium might be

Page 655

proclaimed. Meanwhile, what had to be done was to gain the confidence of
the masses, especially of the factory workers, who were more intelligent
and less conservative than the peasantry, and to create powerful labour
organisations as material for a future political party.
This programme implied, of course, a certain unity of action with the
constitutionalists, from whom, as I have said, the revolutionists of the old
school had stood sternly aloof. There was now no question of a formal
union, and certainly no idea of a "union of hearts," because the Socialists
knew that their ultimate aim would be strenuously opposed by the Liberals,
and the Liberals knew that an attempt was being made to use them as a
cat's-paw; but there seemed to be no reason why they of the two groups
should not observe towards each other a benevolent neutrality, and march
side by side as far as the half-way house, where they could consider the
conditions of the further advance.
When I first became acquainted with the Russian Social Democrats I
imagined that their plan of campaign was of a purely pacific character; and
that they were, unlike their predecessors, an evolutionary, as distinguished
from a revolutionary, party. Subsequently I discovered that this conception
was not quite accurate. In ordinary quiet times they use merely pacific
methods, and they feel that the Proletariat is not yet sufficiently prepared,
intellectually and politically, to assume the great responsibilities which are
reserved for it in the future. Moreover, when the moment comes for getting
rid of the Autocratic Power, they would prefer a gradual process of
liquidation to a sudden cataclysm. So far they may be said to be
evolutionaries rather than revolutionaries, but their plan of campaign does
not entirely exclude violence. They would not consider it their duty to
oppose the use of violence on the part of the more impatient sections of the
revolutionists, and they would have no scruples about utilising disturbances
for the attainment of their own end. Public agitation, which is always likely
in Russia to provoke violent repression by the authorities, they regard as
necessary for keeping alive and strengthening the spirit of opposition; and
when force is used by the police they approve of the agitators using force in
return. To acts of terrorism, however, they are opposed on principle.
Who, then, are the Terrorists, who have assassinated so many great
personages, including the Grand Duke Serge? In reply to this question I
must introduce the reader to another group of the revolutionists who have

Page 656

usually been in hostile, rather than friendly, relations with the Social
Democrats, and who call themselves the Socialist-Revolutionaries
(Sotsialisty-Revolutsionery).
It will be remembered that the terrorist group, commonly called
Narodnaya Volya, or Narodovoltsi, which succeeded in assassinating
Alexander II., were very soon broken up by the police and most of the
leading members were arrested. A few escaped, of whom some remained in
the country and others emigrated to Switzerland or Paris, and efforts at
reorganisation were made, especially in the southern and western provinces,
but they proved ineffectual. At last, sobered by experience and despairing of
further success, some of the prisoners and a few of the exiles—notably
Tikhomirof, who was regarded as the leader—made their peace with the
Government, and for some years terrorism seemed to be a thing of the past.
Passing through Russia on my way home from India and Central Asia at
that time, I came to the conclusion that the young generation had recovered
from its prolonged attack of brain-fever, and had entered on a more normal,
tranquil, and healthy period of existence.
My expectations proved too optimistic. About 1894 the Narodnaya Volya
came to life again, with all its terrorist traditions intact; and shortly
afterwards appeared the new group which I have just mentioned, the
Socialist-Revolutionaries, with somewhat similar principles and a better
organisation. For some seven or eight years the two groups existed side by
side, and then the Narodnaya Volya disappeared, absorbed probably by its
more powerful rival.
During the first years of their existence neither group was strong enough
to cause the Government serious inconvenience, and it was not till 1897-98
that they found means of issuing manifestos and programmes. In these the
Narodovoltsi declared that their immediate aims were the annihilation of
Autocracy, the convocation of a National Assembly and the reorganisation
of the Empire on the principles of federation and local self-government, and
that for the attainment of these objects the means to be employed should
include popular insurrections, military conspiracies, bombs and dynamite.
Very similar, though ostensibly a little more eclectic, was the programme
of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Their ultimate aim was declared to be the
transfer of political authority from the Autocratic Power to the people, the
abolition of private property in the means of production, and in general the

Page 657

reorganisation of national life on Socialist principles. On certain points they
were at one with the Social Democrats. They recognised, for example, that
the social reorganisation must be preceded by a political revolution, that
much preparatory work was necessary, and that attention should be directed
first to the industrial proletariat as the most intelligent section of the masses.
On the other hand they maintained that it was a mistake to confine the
revolutionary activity to the working classes of the towns, who were not
strong enough to overturn the Autocratic Power. The agitation ought,
therefore, to be extended to the peasantry, who were quite "developed"
enough to understand at least the idea of land-nationalisation; and for the
carrying out of this part of the programme a special organisation was
created.
With so many opinions in common, it seemed at one moment as if the
Social Democrats and the Socialist-Revolutionaries might unite their forces
for a combined attack on the Government; but apart from the mutual
jealousy and hatred which so often characterise revolutionary as well as
religious sects, they were prevented from coalescing, or even cordially co-
operating, by profound differences both in doctrine and in method.
The Social Democrats are essentially doctrinaires. Thorough-going
disciples of Karl Marx, they believed in what they consider the immutable
laws of social progress, according to which the Socialistic ideal can be
reached only through capitalism; and the intermediate political revolution,
which is to substitute the will of the people for the Autocratic Power, must
be effected by the conversion and organisation of the industrial proletariat.
With the spiritual pride of men who feel themselves to be the incarnations
or avatars of immutable law, they are inclined to look down with something
very like contempt on mere empirics who are ignorant of scientific
principles and are guided by considerations of practical expediency. The
Social-Revolutionaries seem to them to be empirics of this kind because
they reject the tenets, or at least deny the infallibility, of the Marx school,
cling to the idea of partially resisting the overwhelming influence of
capitalism in Russia, hope that the peasantry will play at least a secondary
part in bringing about the political revolution, and are profoundly convinced
that the advent of political liberty may be greatly accelerated by the use of
terrorism. On this last point they stated their views very frankly in a
pamphlet which they published in 1902 under the title of "Our Task" (Nasha
Zadatcha). It is there said:

Page 658

"One of the powerful means of struggle, dictated by our revolutionary
past and present, is political terrorism, consisting of the annihilation of the
most injurious and influential personages of Russian autocracy in given
conditions. Systematic terrorism, in conjunction with other forms of open
mass-struggle (industrial riots and agrarian risings, demonstrations, etc.),
which receive from terrorism an enormous, decisive significance, will lead
to the disorganisation of the enemy. Terrorist activity will cease only with
the victory over autocracy and the complete attainment of political liberty.
Besides its chief significance as a means of disorganising, terrorist activity
will serve at the same time as a means of propaganda and agitation, a form
of open struggle taking place before the eyes of the whole people,
undermining the prestige of Government authority, and calling into life new
revolutionary forces, while the oral and literary propaganda is being
continued without interruption. Lastly, the terrorist activity serves for the
whole secret revolutionary party as a means of self-defence and of
protecting the organisation against the injurious elements of spies and
treachery."
In accordance with this theory a "militant organisation" (Boevaga
Organisatsia) was formed and soon set to work with revolvers and bombs.
First an attempt was made on the life of Pobedonostsef; then the Minister of
the Interior, Sipiagin, was assassinated; next attempts were made on the
lives of the Governors of Vilna and Kharkof, and the Kharkof chief of
police; and since that time the Governor of Ufa, the Vice-Governor of
Elizabetpol, the Minister of the Interior, M. Plehve, and the Grand Duke
Serge have fallen victims to the terrorist policy.*

* In this list I have not mentioned the assassination of M.
Bogolyepof, Minister of Public Instruction, in 1901, because
I do not know whether it should be attributed to the
Socialist-Revolutionaries or to the Narodovoltsi, who had
not yet amalgamated with them.

Though the Social Democrats have no sentimental squeamishness about
bloodshed, they objected to this policy on the ground that acts of terrorism
were unnecessary and were apt to prove injurious rather than beneficial to
the revolutionist cause. One of the main objects of every intelligent
revolutionary party should be to awaken all classes from their habitual
apathy and induce them to take an active part in the political movement; but
terrorism must have a contrary effect by suggesting that political freedom is

Page 659

to be attained, not by the steady pressure and persevering cooperation of the
people, but by startling, sensational acts of individual heroism.
The efforts of these two revolutionary parties, as well as of minor groups,
to get hold of the industrial proletariat did not escape the notice of the
authorities; and during the labour troubles of 1896, on the suggestion of M.
Witte, the Government had considered the question as to what should be
done to counteract the influence of the agitators. On that question it had no
difficulty in coming to a decision; the condition of the working classes must
be improved. An expert official was accordingly instructed to write a report
on what had already been done in that direction. In his report it was shown
that the Government had long been thinking about the subject. Not to speak
of a still-born law about a ten-hour day for artisans, dating from the time of
Catherine II., an Imperial commission had been appointed as early as 1859,
but nothing practical came of its deliberations until 1882, when legislative
measures were taken for the protection of women and children in factories.
A little later (1886) other grievances were dealt with and partly removed by
regulating contracts of hire, providing that the money derived from
deductions and fines should not be appropriated by the employers, and
creating a staff of factory inspectors who should take care that the
benevolent intentions of the Government were duly carried out. Having
reviewed all these official efforts in 1896, the Government passed in the
following year a law prohibiting night work and limiting the working day to
eleven and a half hours.
This did not satisfy the workmen. Their wages were still low, and it was
difficult to get them increased because strikes and all forms of association
were still, as they had always been, criminal offences. On this point the
Government remained firm so far as the law was concerned, but it gradually
made practical concessions by allowing the workmen to combine for certain
purposes. In 1898, for example, in Kharkof, the Engineers' Mutual Aid
Society was sanctioned, and gradually it became customary to allow the
workmen to elect delegates for the discussion of their grievances with the
employers and inspectors.
Finding that these concessions did not check the growing influence of the
Social Democratic agitators among the operatives, the Government resolved
to go a step further; it would organise the workers on purely trade-unionist
lines, and would thereby combat the Social Democrats, who always advised

Page 660

the strikers to mix up political demands with their material grievances. The
project seemed to have a good prospect of success, because there were
many workmen, especially of the older generation, who did not at all like
the mixing up of politics, which so often led to arrest, imprisonment and
exile, with the practical concerns of every day life.
The first attempt of the kind was made in Moscow under the direction of
a certain Zubatof, chief of the secret police, who had been himself a
revolutionary in his youth, and afterwards an agent provocateur. Aided by
Tikhomirof, the repentant terrorist whom I have already mentioned, Zubatof
organised a large workmen's association, with reading-rooms, lectures,
discussions and other attractions, and sought to convince the members that
they should turn a deaf ear to the Social Democratic agents, and look only
to the Government for the improvement of their condition. In order to gain
their sympathy and confidence, he instructed his subordinates to take the
side of the workmen in all labour disputes, while he himself brought official
pressure to bear on the employers. By this means he made a considerable
number of converts, and for a time the association seemed to prosper, but he
did not possess the extraordinary ability and tact required to play the
complicated game successfully, and he committed the fatal mistake of using
the office-bearers of the association as detectives for the discovery of the
"evil-intentioned." This tactical error had its natural consequences. As soon
as the workmen perceived that their professed benefactors were police
spies, who did not obtain for them any real improvement of their condition,
the popularity of the association rapidly declined. At the same time, the
factory owners complained to the Minister of Finance that the police, who
ought to be guardians of public order, and who had accused the factory
inspectors of stirring up discontent in the labouring population, were
themselves creating troubles by inciting the workmen to make inordinate
demands. The Minister of Finance at the moment was M. Witte, and the
Minister of Interior, responsible for the acts of the police, was M. Plehve,
and between these two official dignitaries, who were already in very
strained relations, Zubatof's activity formed a new base of contention. In
these circumstances it is not surprising that the very risky experiment came
to an untimely end.
In St. Petersburg a similar experiment was made, and it ended much more
tragically. There the chief rôle was played by a mysterious personage called
Father Gapon, who acquired great momentary notoriety. Though a genuine

Page 661

priest, he did not belong by birth, as most Russian priests do, to the
ecclesiastical caste. The son of a peasant in Little Russia, where the ranks of
the clergy are not hermetically sealed against the other social classes, he
aspired to take orders, and after being rusticated from a seminary for
supposed sympathy with revolutionary ideas, he contrived to finish his
studies and obtain ordination. During a residence in Moscow he took part in
the Zubatof experiment, and when that badly conducted scheme collapsed
he was transferred to St. Petersburg and appointed chaplain to a large
convict prison. His new professional duties did not prevent him from
continuing to take a keen interest in the welfare of the working classes, and
in the summer of 1904 he became, with the approval of the police
authorities, president of a large labour union called the Society of Russian
Workmen, which had eleven sections in the various industrial suburbs of the
capital. Under his guidance the experiment proceeded for some months very
successfully. He gained the sympathy and confidence of the workmen, and
so long as no serious questions arose he kept his hold on them; but a storm
was brewing and he proved unequal to the occasion.
In the first days of 1905, when the economic consequences of the war
had come to be keenly felt, a spirit of discontent appeared among the
labouring population of St. Petersburg, and on Sunday, January 15th—
exactly a week before the famous Sunday when the troops were called into
play—a strike began in the Putilof ironworks and spread like wildfire to the
other big works in the neighbourhood. The immediate cause of the
disturbance was the dismissal of some workmen and a demand on the part
of the labour union that they should be reinstated. A deputation, composed
partly of genuine workmen and partly of Social Democratic agitators, and
led by Gapon, negotiated with the managers of the Putilof works, and failed
to effect an arrangement. At this moment Gapon tried hard to confine the
negotiations to the points in dispute, whereas the agitators put forward
demands of a wider kind, such as the eight-hour working day, and they
gradually obtained his concurrence on condition that no political demands
should be introduced into the programme. In defending this condition he
was supported by the workmen, so that when agitators tried to make
political speeches at the meetings they were unceremoniously expelled.
A similar struggle between the "Economists" and the "Politicals" was
going on in the other industrial suburbs, notably in the Nevski quarter,
where 45,000 operatives had struck work, and the Social Democrats were

Page 662

particularly active. In this section of the Labour Union the most influential
member was a young workman called Petroff, who was a staunch Gaponist
in the sense that he wished the workers to confine themselves to their own
grievances and to resist the introduction of political demands. At first he
succeeded in preventing the agitators from speaking at the meetings, but
they soon proved too much for him. At one of the meetings on Tuesday,
when he happened to be absent, a Social Democrat contrived to get himself
elected chairman, and from that moment the political agitators had a free
hand. They had a regular organisation composed of an organiser, three
"oratorical agitators," and several assistant-organisers who attended the
small meetings in the operatives' sleeping-quarters. Besides these there
were a certain number of workmen already converted to Social Democratic
principles who had learned the art of making political speeches.
The reports of the agitators to the central organisation, written hurriedly
during this eventful week, are extremely graphic and interesting. They
declared that there is a frightful amount of work to be done and very few to
do it. Their stock of Social Democratic pamphlets is exhausted and they are
hoarse from speech-making. In spite of their superhuman efforts the masses
remain frightfully "undeveloped." The men willingly collect to hear the
orators, listen to them attentively, express approval or dissent, and even put
questions; but with all this they remain obstinately on the ground of their
own immediate wants, such as the increase of wages and protection against
brutal foremen, and they only hint vaguely at more serious demands. The
agitators, however, are equally obstinate, and they make a few converts. To
illustrate how conversions are made, the following incident is related. At
one meeting the cry of "Stop the war!" is raised by an orator without
sufficient preparation, and at once a voice is heard in the audience saying.
"No, no! The little Japs (Yaposhki) must be beaten!" Thereupon a more
experienced orator comes forward and a characteristic conversation takes
place:
"Have we much land of our own, my friends?" asks the orator.
"Much!" replies the crowd.
"Do we require Manchuria?"
"No!"
"Who pays for the war?"
"We do!"

Page 663

"Are our brothers dying, and do your wives and children remain without
a bit of bread?"
"So it is!" say many, with a significant shake of the head.
Having succeeded so far, the orator tries to turn the popular indignation
against the Tsar by explaining that he is to blame for all this misery and
suffering, but Petroff suddenly appears on the scene and maintains that for
the misery and suffering the Tsar is not at all to blame, for he knows
nothing about it. It is all the fault of his servants, the tchinovniks.
By this device Petroff suppresses the seditious cry of "Down with
autocracy!" which the Social Democrats were anxious to make the
watchword of the movement, but he has thereby been drawn from his strong
position of "No politics," and he is standing, as we shall see presently, on a
slippery incline.
On Thursday and Friday the activity of the leaders and the excitement of
the masses increase. While the Gaponists speak merely of local grievances
and material wants, the Social Democrats incite their hearers to a political
struggle, advising them to demand a Constituent Assembly, and explaining
the necessity for all workmen to draw together and form a powerful
political party. The haranguing goes on from morning to night, and agitators
drive about from one factory to another to keep the excitement at fever-
heat. The police, usually so active on such occasions, do not put in an
appearance. Prince Sviatopolk Mirski, the honest, well-intentioned, liberal
Minister of the Interior, cannot make up his mind to act with energy, and
lets things drift. The agitators themselves are astonished at this
extraordinary inactivity. One of them, writing a few days afterwards, says:
"The police was paralysed. It would have been easy to arrest Gapon, and
discover the orators. On Friday the clubs might have been surrounded and
the orators arrested. . . . In a word, decided measures might have been
taken, but they were not."
It is not only Petroff that has abandoned his strong position of "No
politics"; Gapon is doing likewise. The movement has spread far beyond
what he expected, and he is being carried away by the prevailing
excitement. With all his benevolent intentions, he is of a nervous, excitable
nature, and his besetting sin is vanity. He perceives that by resisting the
Social Democrats he is losing his hold on the masses. Early in the week, as
we have seen, he began to widen his programme in the Social Democratic

Page 664

sense, and every day he makes new concessions. Before the week is
finished a Social Democratic orator can write triumphantly: "In three days
we have transformed the Gaponist assemblies into political meetings!" Like
Petroff, Gapon seeks to defend the Tsar, and he falls into Petroff's
strategical mistake of pretending that the Tsar knows nothing of the
sufferings of his people. From that admission to the resolution that the Tsar
must somehow be informed personally and directly, by some means outside
of the regular official channel, there is but one step, and that step is quickly
taken. On Friday morning Gapon has determined to present with his own
hands a petition to his Majesty, and the petition is already drafted,
containing demands which go far beyond workmen's grievances. After
resisting the Social Democratic agitators so stoutly, he is now going over,
bag and baggage, to the Social Democratic camp.
This wonderful change was consummated on Friday evening at a
conference which he held with some delegates of the Social Democrats.
From an account written by one of these delegates immediately after the
meeting we get an insight into the worthy priest's character and motives. In
the morning he had written to them: "I have 100,000 workmen, and I am
going with them to the Palace to present a petition. If it is not granted, we
shall make a revolution. Do you agree?" They did not like the idea, because
the Social Democratic policy is to extort concessions, not to ask favours,
and to refrain from anything that might increase the prestige of the
Autocratic Power. In their reply, therefore, they consented simply to discuss
the matter. I proceed now to quote from the delegate's account of what took
place at the conference:
"The company consisted of Gapon, with two adherents, and five Social
Democrats. All sat round a table, and the conversation began. Gapon is a
good-looking man, with dark complexion and thoughtful, sympathetic face.
He is evidently very tired, and, like the other orators, he is hoarse. To the
questions addressed to him, he replies: 'The masses are at present so
electrified that you may lead them wherever you like. We shall go on
Sunday to the Palace, and present a petition. If we are allowed to pass
without hindrance, we shall march to the Palace Square, and summon the
Tsar from Tsarskoe Selo. We shall wait for him till the evening. When he
arrives, I shall go to him with a deputation, and in presenting to him the
petition, I shall say: 'Your Majesty! Things cannot go on like this; it is time
to give the people liberty.' (Tak nelzya! Para dat' narodu svobodu.) If he

Page 665

consents, we shall insist that he take an oath before the people. Only then
we shall come away, and when we begin to work, it will only be for eight
hours a day. If, on the other hand, we are prevented from entering the city,
we shall request and beg, and if they do not let us pass, we shall force our
way. In the Palace Square we shall find troops, and we shall entreat them to
come over to our side. If they beat us, we shall strike back. There will be
sacrifices, but part of the troops will come over to us, and then, being
ourselves strong in numbers, we shall make a revolution. We shall construct
barricades, pillage the armourers' shops, break open the prisons, and seize
the telephones and telegraphs. The Socialist-Revolutionaries have promised
us bombs, and the Democrats money: and we shall be victorious!*

* This confirms the information which comes to me from other
quarters that Gapon was already in friendly relations with
other revolutionary groups.

"Such, in a few words, were the ideas which Gapon expounded. The
impression he made on us was that he did not clearly realise where he was
going. Acting with sincerity, he was ready to die, but he was convinced that
the troops would not fire, and that the deputation would be received by the
Emperor. He did not distinguish between different methods. Though not at
all a partisan of violent means, he had become infuriated against autocracy
and the Tsar, as was shown by his language when he said: 'If that blockhead
of a Tsar comes out' (Yesli etot durak Tsar vuidet) . . . Burning with the
desire to attain his object, he looked on revolution like a child, as if it could
be accomplished in a day with empty hands!"
Knowing that no previous preparations had been made for a revolution
such as Gapon talked of, the Social Democratic agents tried to dissuade him
from carrying out his idea on Sunday, but he stood firm. He had already
committed himself publicly to the project. At a workmen's meeting in
another quarter (Vassiliostrof) earlier in the day he had explained the
petition, and said: "Let us go to the Winter Palace and summon the
Emperor, and let us tell him our wants; if he does not listen to us we do not
require him any longer." To a Social Democrat who shook him warmly by
the hand and expressed his astonishment that there should be such a man
among the clergy, he replied: "I am no longer a priest; I am a fighter for
liberty! They want to exile me, and for some nights I have not slept at
home." When offered assistance to escape arrest, he answered laconically:

Page 666

"Thanks; I have already a place of refuge." After his departure from the
meeting one of his friends, to whom he had confided a copy of the petition,
rose and said: "Now has arrived the great historical moment! Now we can
and must demand rights and liberty!" After hearing the petition read the
meeting decided that if the Tsar did not come out at the demand of the
people strong measures should be taken, and one orator indicated pretty
plainly what they should be: "We don't require a Tsar who is deaf to the
woes of the people; we shall perish ourselves, but we shall kill him. Swear
that you will all come to the Palace on Sunday at twelve o'clock!" The
audience raised their hands in token of assent.
Finding it impossible to dissuade Gapon from his purpose, the Social
Democrats told him that they would take advantage of the circumstances
independently, and that if he was allowed to enter the city with his
deputation they would organise monster meetings in the Palace Square.
The imperious tone used by Gapon at the public meetings and private
consultations was adopted by him also in his letters to the Minister of the
Interior and to the Emperor. To the former he wrote:
"The workmen and inhabitants of St. Petersburg of various classes desire
to see the Tsar at two o'clock on Sunday in the Winter Palace Square, in
order to lay before him personally their needs and those of the whole
Russian people. . . . Tell the Tsar that I and the workmen, many thousands
in number, have peacefully, with confidence in him, but irrevocably,
resolved to proceed to the Winter Palace. Let him show his confidence by
deeds, and not by manifestos."
To the Tsar himself his language was not more respectful:
"Sovereign,—I fear the Ministers have not told you the truth about the
situation. The whole people, trusting in you, has resolved to appear at the
Winter Palace at two o'clock in the afternoon, in order to inform you of its
needs. If you hesitate, and do not appear before the people, then you tear the
moral bonds between you and them. Trust in you will disappear, because
innocent blood will flow. Appear to-morrow before your people and receive
our address of devotion in a courageous spirit! I and the labour
representatives, my brave comrades, guarantee the inviolability of your
person."
Gapon was no longer merely the president of the Workmen's Union:
inebriated with the excitement he had done so much to create, he now

Page 667

imagined himself the representative of the oppressed Russian people, and
the heroic leader of a great political revolution. In the petition which he had
prepared he said little about the grievances of the St. Petersburg workmen
whose interests he had a right to advocate, and preferred to soar into much
higher regions:
"The bureaucracy has brought the country to the verge of ruin, and, by a
shameful war, is bringing it to its downfall. We have no voice in the heavy
burdens imposed on us; we do not even know for whom or why this money
is wrung from the impoverished people, and we do not know how it is
expended. This state of things is contrary to the Divine laws, and renders
life unbearable. Assembled before your palace, we plead for our salvation.
Refuse not your aid; raise your people from the tomb, and give them the
means of working out their own destiny. Rescue them from the intolerable
yoke of officialdom; throw down the wall that separates you from them, in
order that they may rule with you the country that was created for their
happiness—a happiness which is being wrenched from us, leaving nothing
but sorrow and humiliation."
With an innate sentiment of autocratic dignity the Emperor declined to
obey the imperious summons, and he thereby avoided an unseemly
altercation with the excited priest, as well as the boisterous public meetings
which the Social Democrats were preparing to hold in the Palace Square.
Orders were given to the police and the troops to prevent the crowds of
workmen from penetrating into the centre of the city from the industrial
suburbs. The rest need not be described in detail. On Sunday the crowds
tried to force their way, the troops fired, and many of the demonstrators
were killed or wounded. How many it is impossible to say; between the
various estimates there is an enormous discrepancy. At one of the first
volleys Father Gapon fell, but he turned out to be quite unhurt, and was
spirited away to his place of refuge, whence he escaped across the frontier.
As soon as he had an opportunity of giving public expression to his
feelings, he indulged in very strong language. In his letters and
proclamations the Tsar is called a miscreant and an assassin, and is
described as traitorous, bloodthirsty, and bestial. To the ministers he is
equally uncomplimentary. They appear to him an accursed band of
brigands, Mamelukes, jackals, monsters. Against the Tsar, "with his
reptilian brood," and the ministers alike, he vows vengeance—"death to

Page 668

them all!" As for the means for realising his sacred mission, he recommends
bombs, dynamite, individual and wholesale terrorism, popular insurrection,
and paralysing the life of the cities by destroying the water-mains, the gas-
pipes, the telegraph and telephone wires, the railways and tram-ways, the
Government buildings and the prisons. At some moments he seems to
imagine himself invested with papal powers, for he anathematises the
soldiers who did their duty on the eventful day, whilst he blesses and
absolves from their oath of allegiance those who help the nation to win
liberty.
So far I have spoken merely of the main currents in the revolutionary
movement. Of the minor currents—particularly those in the outlying
provinces, where the Socialist tendencies were mingled with nationalist
feeling—I shall have occasion to speak when I come to deal with the
present political situation as a whole. Meanwhile, I wish to sketch in outline
the foreign policy which has powerfully contributed to bring about the
present crisis.

Page 669

CHAPTER XXXVIII
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION AND FOREIGN POLICY

Rapid Growth of Russia—Expansive Tendency of Agricultural Peoples—
The Russo-Slavonians—The Northern Forest and the Steppe—Colonisation
—The Part of the Government in the Process of Expansion—Expansion
towards the West—Growth of the Empire Represented in a Tabular Form—
Commercial Motive for Expansion—The Expansive Force in the Future—
Possibilities of Expansion in Europe—Persia, Afghanistan, and India—
Trans-Siberian Railway and Weltpolitik—A Grandiose Scheme—
Determined Opposition of Japan—Negotiations and War—Russia's
Imprudence Explained—Conclusion.
The rapid growth of Russia is one of the most remarkable facts of
modern history. An insignificant tribe, or collection of tribes, which, a
thousand years ago, occupied a small district near the sources of the
Dnieper and Western Dvina, has grown into a great nation with a territory
stretching from the Baltic to the Northern Pacific, and from the Polar Ocean
to the frontiers of Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, and China. We have here a
fact well deserving of investigation, and as the process is still going on and
is commonly supposed to threaten our national interests, the investigation
ought to have for us more than a mere scientific interest. What is the secret
of this expansive power? Is it a mere barbarous lust of territorial
aggrandisement, or is it some more reasonable motive? And what is the
nature of the process? Is annexation followed by assimilation, or do the new
acquisitions retain their old character? Is the Empire in its present extent a
homogeneous whole, or merely a conglomeration of heterogenous units
held together by the outward bond of centralised administration? If we
could find satisfactory answers to these questions, we might determine how
far Russia is strengthened or weakened by her annexations of territory, and
might form some plausible conjectures as to how, when, and where the
process of expansion is to stop.
By glancing at her history from the economic point of view we may
easily detect one prominent cause of expansion.

Page 670

An agricultural people, employing merely the primitive methods of
agriculture, has always a strong tendency to widen its borders. The natural
increase of population demands a constantly increasing production of grain,
whilst the primitive methods of cultivation exhaust the soil and steadily
diminish its productivity. With regard to this stage of economic
development, the modest assertion of Malthus, that the supply of food does
not increase so rapidly as the population, often falls far short of the truth. As
the population increases, the supply of food may decrease not only
relatively, but absolutely. When a people finds itself in this critical position,
it must adopt one of two alternatives: either it must prevent the increase of
population, or it must increase the production of food. In the former case it
may legalise the custom of "exposing" infants, as was done in ancient
Greece; or it may regularly sell a large portion of the young women and
children, as was done until recently in Circassia; or the surplus population
may emigrate to foreign lands, as the Scandinavians did in the ninth
century, and as we ourselves are doing in a more peaceable fashion at the
present day. The other alternative may be effected either by extending the
area of cultivation or by improving the system of agriculture.
The Russo-Slavonians, being an agricultural people, experienced this
difficulty, but for them it was not serious. A convenient way of escape was
plainly indicated by their peculiar geographical position. They were not
hemmed in by lofty mountains or stormy seas. To the south and east—at
their very doors, as it were—lay a boundless expanse of thinly populated
virgin soil, awaiting the labour of the husbandman, and ready to repay it
most liberally. The peasantry therefore, instead of exposing their infants,
selling their daughters, or sweeping the seas as Vikings, simply spread out
towards the east and south. This was at once the most natural and the wisest
course, for of all the expedients for preserving the equilibrium between
population and food-production, increasing the area of cultivation is, under
the circumstances just described, the easiest and most effective.
Theoretically the same result might have been obtained by improving the
method of agriculture, but practically this was impossible. Intensive culture
is not likely to be adopted so long as expansion is easy. High farming is a
thing to be proud of when there is a scarcity of land, but it would be absurd
to attempt it where there is abundance of virgin soil in the vicinity.
The process of expansion, thus produced by purely economic causes, was
accelerated by influences of another kind, especially during the seventeenth

Page 671

and eighteenth centuries. The increase in the number of officials, the
augmentation of the taxes, the merciless exactions of the Voyevods and
their subordinates, the transformation of the peasants and "free wandering
people" into serfs, the ecclesiastical reforms and consequent persecution of
the schismatics, the frequent conscriptions and violent reforms of Peter the
Great—these and other kinds of oppression made thousands flee from their
homes and seek a refuge in the free territory, where there were no officials,
no tax-gatherers, and no proprietors. But the State, with its army of tax-
gatherers and officials, followed close on the heels of the fugitives, and
those who wished to preserve their liberty had to advance still further.
Notwithstanding the efforts of the authorities to retain the population in the
localities actually occupied, the wave of colonisation moved steadily
onwards.
The vast territory which lay open to the colonists consisted of two
contiguous regions, separated from each other by no mountains or rivers,
but widely differing from each other in many respects. The one, comprising
all the northern part of Eastern Europe and of Asia, even unto Kamchatka,
may be roughly described as a land of forests, intersected by many rivers,
and containing numerous lakes and marshes; the other, stretching
southwards to the Black Sea, and eastwards far away into Central Asia, is
for the most part what Russians call "the Steppe," and Americans would call
the prairies.
Each of these two regions presented peculiar inducements and peculiar
obstacles to colonisation. So far as the facility of raising grain was
concerned, the southern region was decidedly preferable. In the north the
soil had little natural fertility, and was covered with dense forests, so that
much time and labour had to be expended in making a clearing before the
seed could be sown.* In the south, on the contrary, the squatter had no trees
to fell, and no clearing to make. Nature had cleared the land for him, and
supplied him with a rich black soil of marvellous fertility, which has not yet
been exhausted by centuries of cultivation. Why, then, did the peasant often
prefer the northern forests to the fertile Steppe where the land was already
prepared for him?

* The modus operandi has been already described; vide supra,
pp. 104 et seq.

Page 672

For this apparent inconsistency there was a good and valid reason. The
muzhik had not, even in those good old times, any passionate love of labour
for its own sake, nor was he by any means insensible to the facilities for
agriculture afforded by the Steppe. But he could not regard the subject
exclusively from the agricultural point of view. He had to take into
consideration the fauna as well as the flora of the two regions. At the head
of the fauna in the northern forests stood the peace-loving, laborious
Finnish tribes, little disposed to molest settlers who did not make
themselves obnoxiously aggressive; on the Steppe lived the predatory,
nomadic hordes, ever ready to attack, plunder, and carry off as slaves the
peaceful agricultural population. These facts, as well as the agricultural
conditions, were known to intending colonists, and influenced them in their
choice of a new home. Though generally fearless and fatalistic in a higher
degree, they could not entirely overlook the dangers of the Steppe, and
many of them preferred to encounter the hard work of the forest region.
These differences in the character and population of the two regions
determined the character of the colonisation. Though the colonisation of the
northern regions was not effected entirely without bloodshed, it was, on the
whole, of a peaceful kind, and consequently received little attention from
the contemporary chroniclers. The colonisation of the Steppe, on the
contrary, required the help of the Cossacks, and forms, as I have already
shown, one of the bloodiest pages of European history.
Thus, we see, the process of expansion towards the north, east, and south
may be described as a spontaneous movement of the agricultural
population. It must, however, be admitted that this is an imperfect and one-
sided representation of the phenomenon. Though the initiative
unquestionably came from the people, the Government played an important
part in the movement.
In early times when Russia was merely a conglomeration of independent
principalities, the Princes were under the moral and political obligation of
protecting their subjects, and this obligation coincided admirably with their
natural desire to extend their dominions. When the Grand Princes of
Muscovy, in the fifteenth century, united the numerous principalities and
proclaimed themselves Tsars, they accepted this obligation for the whole
country, and conceived much grander schemes of territorial
aggrandisement. Towards the north and northeast no strenuous efforts were

Page 673

required. The Republic of Novgorod easily gained possession of Northern
Russia as far as the Ural Mountains, and Siberia was conquered by a small
band of Cossacks without the authorisation of Muscovy, so that the Tsars
had merely to annex the already conquered territory. In the southern region
the part played by the Government was very different. The agricultural
population had to be constantly protected along a frontier of enormous
length, lying open at all points to the incursions of nomadic tribes. To
prevent raids it was necessary to keep up a military cordon, and this means
did not always ensure protection to those living near the frontier. The
nomads often came in formidable hordes, which could be successfully
resisted only by large armies, and sometimes the armies were not large
enough to cope with them. Again and again during the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries Tartar hordes swept over the country—burning the
villages and towns, and spreading devastation wherever they appeared—
and during more than two centuries Russia had to pay a heavy tribute to the
Khans.
Gradually the Tsars threw off this galling yoke. Ivan the Terrible annexed
the three Khanates of the Lower Volga—Kazan, Kipttchak, and Astrakhan
—and in that way removed the danger of a foreign domination. But
permanent protection was not thereby secured to the outlying provinces.
The nomadic tribes living near the frontier continued their raids, and in the
slave markets of the Crimea the living merchandise was supplied by Russia
and Poland.
To protect an open frontier against the incursions of nomadic tribes three
methods are possible: the construction of a great wall, the establishment of
a strong military cordon, and the permanent subjugation of the marauders.
The first of these expedients, adopted by the Romans in Britain and by the
Chinese on their northwestern frontier, is enormously expensive, and was
utterly impossible in a country like Southern Russia, where there is no stone
for building purposes; the second was constantly tried, and constantly found
wanting; the third alone proved practicable and efficient. Though the
Government has long since recognised that the acquisition of barren, thinly
populated steppes is a burden rather than an advantage, it has been induced
to go on making annexations for the purpose of self-defence, as well as for
other reasons.

Page 674

In consequence of this active part which the Government took in the
extension of the territory, the process of political expansion sometimes got
greatly ahead of the colonisation. After the Turkish wars and consequent
annexations in the time of Catherine II., for example, a great part of
Southern Russia was almost uninhabited, and the deficiency had to be
corrected, as we have seen, by organised emigration. At the present day, in
the Asiatic provinces, there are still immense tracts of unoccupied land,
some of which are being gradually colonised.
If we turn now from the East to the West we shall find that the expansion
in this direction was of an entirely different kind. The country lying to the
westward of the early Russo-Slavonian settlements had a poor soil and a
comparatively dense population, and consequently held out little
inducement to emigration. Besides this, it was inhabited by warlike
agricultural races, who were not only capable of defending their own
territory, but even strongly disposed to make encroachments on their eastern
neighbours. Russian expansion to the westward was, therefore, not a
spontaneous movement of the agricultural population, but the work of the
Government, acting slowly and laboriously by means of diplomacy and
military force; it had, however, a certain historical justification.
No sooner had Russia freed herself, in the fifteenth century, from the
Tartar domination, than her political independence, and even her national
existence, were threatened from the West. Her western neighbours, were
like herself, animated with that tendency to national expansion which I have
above described; and for a time it seemed doubtful who should ultimately
possess the vast plains of Eastern Europe. The chief competitors were the
Tsars of Moscow and the Kings of Poland, and the latter appeared to have
the better chance. In close connection with Western Europe, they had been
able to adopt many of the improvements which had recently been made in
the art of war, and they already possessed the rich valley of the Dnieper.
Once, with the help of the free Cossacks, they succeeded in overrunning the
whole of Muscovy, and a son of the Polish king was elected Tsar in
Moscow. By attempting to accomplish their purpose in a too hasty and
reckless fashion, they raised a storm of religious and patriotic fanaticism,
which very soon drove them out of their newly acquired possessions. The
country remained, however, in a very precarious position, and its more
intelligent rulers perceived plainly that, in order to carry on the struggle

Page 675

successfully, they must import something of that Western civilisation which
gave such an advantage to their opponents.
Some steps had already been taken in that direction. In the year 1553 an
English navigator, whilst seeking for a short route to China and India, had
accidentally discovered the port of Archangel on the White Sea, and since
that time the Tsars had kept up an intermittent diplomatic and commercial
intercourse with England. But this route was at all times tedious and
dangerous, and during a great part of the year it was closed by the ice. In
view of these difficulties the Tsars tried to import "cunning foreign
artificers," by way of the Baltic; but their efforts were hampered by the
Livonian Order, who at that time held the east coast, and who considered,
like the Europeans on the coast of Africa at the present day, that the
barbarous natives of the interior should not be supplied with arms and
ammunition. All the other routes to the West traversed likewise the territory
of rivals, who might at any time become avowed enemies. Under these
circumstances the Tsars naturally desired to break through the barrier which
hemmed them in, and the acquisition of the eastern coast of the Baltic
became one of the chief objects of Russia's foreign policy.
After Poland, Russia's most formidable rival was Sweden. That power
early acquired a large amount of territory to the east of the Baltic—
including the mouths of the Neva, where St. Petersburg now stands—and
long harboured ambitious schemes of further conquest. In the troublous
times when the Poles overran the Tsardom of Muscovy, she took advantage
of the occasion to annex a considerable amount of territory, and her
expansion in this direction went on in intermittent fashion until it was
finally stopped by Peter the Great.
In comparison with these two rivals Russia was weak in all that regarded
the art of war; but she had two immense advantages: she had a very large
population, and a strong, stable Government that could concentrate the
national forces for any definite purpose. All that she required for success in
the competition was an army on the European model. Peter the Great
created such an army, and won the prize. After this the political
disintegration of Poland proceeded rapidly, and when that unhappy country
fell to pieces Russia naturally took for herself the lion's share of the spoil.
Sweden, too, sank to political insignificance, and gradually lost all her
trans-Baltic possessions. The last of them—the Grand Duchy of Finland,

Page 676

which stretches from the Gulf of Finland to the Polar Ocean—was ceded to
Russia by the peace of Friederichshamm in 1809.

The territorial extent of all these acquisitions will be best shown in
a tabular form. The following table represents the process of expansion
from the time when Ivan III. united the independent principalities and
threw off the Tartar yoke, down to the accession of Peter the Great in
1682:

English
Sq. Miles.
In 1505 the Tsardom of Muscovy contained about 784,000
" 1583 " " " " 996,000
" 1584 " " " " 2,650,000
" 1598 " " " " 3,328,000
" 1676 " " " " 5,448,000
" 1682 " " " " 5,618,000

Of these 5,618,000 English square miles about 1,696,000 were in Europe
and about 3,922,000 in Asia. Peter the Great, though famous as a conqueror,
did not annex nearly so much territory as many of his predecessors and
successors. At his death, in 1752, the Empire contained, in round numbers,
1,738,000 square miles in Europe and 4,092,000 in Asia. The following
table shows the subsequent expansion:

In Europe and the Caucasus In Asia.
Eng. sq. m Eng. sq. m.
In 1725 the Russian Empire contained about 1,738,000 4,092,000
" 1770 " " " " 1,780,000 4,452,000
" 1800 " " " " 2,014,000 4,452,000
" 1825 " " " " 2,226,000 4,452,000
" 1855 " " " " 2,261,250 5,194,000
" 1867 " " " " 2,267,360 5,267,560
" 1897 " " " " 2,267,360 6,382,321

In this table is not included the territory in the North-west of America—
containing about 513,250 English square miles—which was annexed to
Russia in 1799 and ceded to the United States in 1867.
When once Russia has annexed she does not readily relax her grasp. She
has, however, since the death of Peter the Great, on four occasions ceded
territory which had come into her possession. To Persia she ceded, in 1729,
Mazanderan and Astrabad, and in 1735 a large portion of the Caucasus; in
1856, by the Treaty of Paris, she gave up the mouths of the Danube and part
of Bessarabia; in 1867 she sold to the United States her American
possessions; in 1881 she retroceded to China the greater part of Kuldja,

Page 677

which she had occupied for ten years; and now she is releasing her hold on
Manchuria under the pressure of Japan.
The increase in the population—due in part to territorial acquisitions—
since 1722, when the first census was taken, has been as follows:—

In 1722 the Empire contained about 14 million inhabitants.
" 1742 " " " 16 "
" 1762 " " " 19 "
" 1782 " " " 28 "
" 1796 " " " 36 "
" 1812 " " " 41 "
" 1815 " " " 45 "
" 1835 " " " 60 "
" 1851 " " " 68 "
" 1858 " " " 44 "
" 1897 " " " 129 "

So much for the past. To sum up, we may say that, if we have read
Russian history aright, the chief motives of expansion have been
spontaneous colonisation, self-defence against nomadic tribes, and high
political aims, such as the desire to reach the sea-coast; and that the process
has been greatly facilitated by peculiar geographical conditions and the
autocratic form of government. Before passing to the future, I must mention
another cause of expansion which has recently come into play, and which
has already acquired very great importance.
Russia is rapidly becoming, as I have explained in a previous chapter, a
great industrial and commercial nation, and is anxious to acquire new
markets for her manufactured goods. Though her industries cannot yet
supply her own wants, she likes to peg out claims for the future, so as not to
be forestalled by more advanced nations. I am not sure that she ever makes
a conquest exclusively for this purpose, but whenever it happens that she
has other reasons for widening her borders, the idea of acquiring
commercial advantages acts as a subsidiary incentive, and as soon as the
territory is annexed she raises round it a line of commercial fortifications in
the shape of custom-houses, through which foreign goods have great
difficulty in forcing their way.
This policy is quite intelligible from the patriotic point of view, but
Russians like to justify it, and condemn English competition, on higher
ground. England, they say, is like a successful manufacturer who has
oustripped his rivals and who seeks to prevent any new competitors from
coming into the field. By her mercantile policy she has become the great

Page 678

blood-sucker of other nations. Having no cause to fear competition, she
advocates the insidious principles of Free Trade, and deluges foreign
countries with her manufactures to such an extent that unprotected native
industries are inevitably ruined. Thus all nations have long paid tribute to
England, but the era of emancipation had dawned. The fallacies of Free
Trade have been detected and exposed, and Russia, like other nations, has
found in the beneficent power of protective tariffs a means of escape from
British economic thraldom. Henceforth, not only the muzhiks of European
Russia, but also the populations of Central Asia, will be saved from the
heartless exploitation of Manchester and Birmingham—and be handed over,
I presume, to the tender mercies of the manufacturers of Moscow and St.
Petersburg, who sell their goods much dearer than their English rivals.
Having thus analysed the expansive tendency, let us endeavour to
determine how the various factors of which it is composed are acting in the
present and are likely to act in the future. In this investigation it will be well
to begin with the simpler, and proceed gradually to the more complex parts
of the problem.
Towards the north and the west the history of Russian expansion may
almost be regarded as closed. Northwards there is nothing to be annexed but
the Arctic Ocean and the Polar regions; and, westwards, annexations at the
expense of Germany are not to be thought of. There remain, therefore, only
Sweden and Norway. They may possibly, at some future time, come within
the range of Russia's territorial appetite, but at present the only part of the
Scandinavian Peninsula on which she is supposed to cast longing eyes is a
barren district in the extreme north, which is said to contain an excellent
warm-water port.
Towards the south-west there are possibilities of future expansion, and
already some people talk of Austrian Galicia being geographically and
ethnographically a part of Russia; but so long as the Austro-Hungarian
Empire holds together such possibilities do not come within the sphere of
practical politics.
Farther east, towards the Balkan Peninsula, the expansive tendency is
much more complicated and of very ancient date. The Russo-Slavs who
held the valley of the Dnieper from the ninth to the thirteenth century
belonged to those numerous frontier tribes which the tottering Byzantine
Empires attempted to ward off by diplomacy and rich gifts, and by giving to

Page 679

the troublesome chiefs, on condition of their accepting Christianity,
princesses of the Imperial family as brides. Vladimir, Prince of Kief, now
recognised as a Saint by the Russian Church, accepted Christianity in this
way (A. D. 988), and his subjects followed his example. Russia thus
became ecclesiastically a part of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the
people learned to regard Tsargrad—that is, the City of the Tsar, as the
Byzantine Emperor was then called—with peculiar veneration.
All through the long Tartar domination, when the nomadic hordes held
the valley of the Dnieper and formed a barrier between Russia and the
Balkan Peninsula, the capital of the Greek Orthodox world was
remembered and venerated by the Russian people, and in the fifteenth
century it acquired in their eyes a new significance. At that time the relative
positions of Constantinople and Moscow were changed. Constantinople fell
under the power of the Mahometan Turks, whilst Moscow threw off the
yoke of the Mahometan Tartars, the northern representatives of the Turkish
race. The Grand Prince of Moscow thereby became the Protector of the
Faith, and in some sort the successor of the Byzantine Tsars. To strengthen
this claim, Ivan III. married a niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, and his
successors went further in the same direction by assuming the title of Tsar,
and inventing a fable about their ancestor Rurik having been a descendant
of Caesar Augustus.
All this would seem to a lawyer, or even to a diplomatist, a very shadowy
title, and none of the Russian monarchs—except perhaps Catherine II., who
conceived the project of resuscitating the Byzantine Empire, and caused one
of her grandsons to learn modern Greek, in view of possible contingencies
—ever thought seriously of claiming the imaginary heritage; but the idea
that the Tsars ought to reign in Tsargrad, and that St. Sophia, polluted by
Moslem abominations, should be restored to the Orthodox Christians,
struck deep root in the minds of the Russian people, and is still by no means
extinct. As soon as serious disturbances break out in the East the peasantry
begin to think that perhaps the time has come for undertaking a crusade for
the recovery of the Holy City on the Bosphorus, and for the liberation of
their brethren in the faith who groan under Turkish bondage.
Essentially different from this religious sentiment, but often blended with
it, is a vague feeling of racial affinity, which has long existed among the
various Slav nationalities, and which was greatly developed during last

Page 680

century by writers of the Panslavist school. When Germans and Italians
were striving after political independence and unity, it naturally occurred to
the Slavs that they might do likewise. The idea became popular among the
subject Slav nationalities of Austria and Turkey, and it awoke a certain
amount of enthusiasm in Moscow, where it was hoped that "all the Slav
streams would unite in the great Russian Sea." It required no great political
perspicacity to foresee that in any confederation of Slav nationalities the
hegemony must necessarily devolve on Russia, the only Slav State which
has succeeded in becoming a Great Power.
Those two currents of national feeling ran parallel to, and intermingled
with, the policy of the Government. Desirous of becoming a great naval
Power, Russia has always striven to reach the sea-coast and obtain good
harbours. In the north and north-west she succeeded in a certain degree, but
neither the White Sea nor the Baltic satisfied her requirements, and she
naturally turned her eyes to the Mediterranean. With difficulty she gained
possession of the northern shores of the Black Sea, but her designs were
thereby only half realised, because the Turks held the only outlet to the
Mediterranean, and could effectually blockade, so far as the open sea is
concerned, all her Black Sea ports, without employing a single ship of war.
Thus the possession of the Straits, involving necessarily the possession of
Constantinople, became a cardinal point of Russia's foreign policy. Any
description of the various methods adopted by her at different times for the
attainment of this end does not enter into my present programme, but I may
say briefly that the action of the three factors above mentioned—the
religious feeling, the Panslavist sentiment, and the political aims—has
never been better exemplified than in the last struggle with Turkey,
culminating in the Treaty of San Stefano and the Congress of Berlin.
For all classes in Russia the result of that struggle was a feeling of
profound disappointment. The peasantry bewailed the fact that the Crescent
on St. Sophia had not been replaced by the Cross; the Slavophil patriots
were indignant that the "little brothers" had shown themselves unworthy of
the generous efforts and sacrifices made on their behalf, and that a portion
of the future Slav confederation had passed under the domination of
Austria; and the Government recognised that the acquisition of the Straits
must be indefinitely postponed. Then history repeated itself. After the
Crimean War, in accordance with Prince Gortchakoff's famous epigram, La
Russie ne boude pas elle se recueille, the Government had for some years

Page 681

abandoned an active policy in Europe, and devoted itself to the work of
internal reorganisation; whilst the military party had turned their attention to
making new acquisitions of territory and influence in Asia. In like manner,
after the Turkish campaign of 1877-78, Alexander III., turning his back on
the Slav brethren, inaugurated an era of peace in Europe and of territorial
expansion in the east. In this direction the expansive force was not affected
by religious feeling, or Panslavist sentiment, and was controlled and guided
by purely political considerations. It is consequently much easier to
determine in this field of action what the political aims really are.
In Asia, as in Europe, the dominant factor in the policy of the
Government has been the desire to reach the sea-coast; and in both
continents the ports first acquired were in northern latitudes where the
coasts are free from ice during only a part of the year. In this respect,
Nikolaefsk and Vladivostok in the Far East correspond to Archangel and St.
Petersburg in Europe. Such ports could not fulfil all the requirements, and
consequently the expansive tendency turned southwards—in Europe
towards the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and in Asia towards the
Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Pechili.
In Persia the Russian Government pursues the policy of pacific
infiltration, and already the northern half of the Shah's dominions is pretty
well permeated with Russian influence, commercial and political. In the
southern half the infiltration is to some extent checked by physical obstacles
and British influence, but it is steadily advancing, and the idea of obtaining
a port on the Persian Gulf is coming within the range of practical politics.
In Afghanistan also the pressure is felt, and here too the expansive
tendency meets with opposition from England. More than once the two
great Powers have come dangerously near to war—notably in 1885, at the
moment of the Penjdeh incident, when the British Parliament voted
11,000,000 pounds for military preparations. Fortunately on that occasion
the problem was solved by diplomacy. The northern frontier of Afghanistan
was demarcated by a joint commission, and an agreement was come to by
which this line should form the boundary of the British and Russian spheres
of influence. For some years Russia scrupulously respected this agreement,
but during our South African difficulties she showed symptoms of departing
from it, and at one moment orders were issued from St. Petersburg for a
military demonstration on the Afghan frontier. Strange to say, the military

Page 682

authorities, who are usually very bellicose, deprecated such a movement, on
the ground that a military demonstration in a country like Afghanistan
might easily develop into a serious campaign, and that a serious campaign
ought not to be undertaken in that region until after the completion of the
strategical railways from Orenburg to Tashkent.
As this important line has now been completed, and other strategic lines
are in contemplation, the question arises whether Russia meditates an attack
on India. It is a question which is not easily answered. No doubt there are
many Russians who think it would be a grand thing to annex our Indian
Empire, with its teeming millions and its imaginary fabulous treasures, and
not a few young officers imagine that it would be an easy task. Further, it is
certain that the problem of an invasion has been studied by the
Headquarters Staff in St. Petersburg, just as the problem of an invasion of
England has been studied by the Headquarters Staff in Berlin. It may be
pretty safely asserted, however, that the idea of a conquest of India has
never been seriously entertained in the Russian official world. What has
been seriously entertained, not only in the official world, but by the
Government itself, is the idea—strongly recommended by the late General
Skobelef—that Russia should, as quickly as possible, get within striking
distance of our Indian possessions, so that she may always be able to bring
strong diplomatic pressure on the British Government, and in the event of a
conflict immobilise a large part of the British army.
The expansive tendency in the direction of the Persian Gulf and the
Indian Ocean was considerably weakened by the completion of the Trans-
Siberian Railway and the rapid development of an aggressive policy in the
Far east. Never, perhaps, has the construction of a single line produced such
deep and lasting changes in the sphere of Weltpolitik.
As soon as the Trans-Siberian was being rapidly constructed a
magnificent prospect opened up to the gaze of imaginative politicians in St.
Petersburg. The foreground was Manchuria a region of 364,000 square
miles, endowed by nature with enormous mineral resources, and presenting
a splendid field for agricultural colonisation and commercial enterprise.
Beyond was seen Korea, geographically an appendix of Manchuria,
possessing splendid harbours, and occupied by an effete, unwarlike
population, wholly incapable of resisting a European Power. That was quite
enough to inflame the imagination of patriotic Russians; but there was

Page 683

something more, dimly perceived in the background. Once in possession of
Manchuria, supplied with a network of railways, Russia would dominate
Peking and the whole of Northern China, and she would thus be able to play
a decisive part in the approaching struggle of the European Powers for the
Far-Eastern Sick Man's inheritance.
Of course there were obstacles in the way of realising this grandiose
scheme, and there were some cool heads in St. Petersburg who were not
slow to point them out. In the first place the undertaking must be extremely
costly, and the economic condition of Russia proper was not such as to
justify the expenditure of an enormous capital which must be for many
years unproductive. Any superfluous capital which the country might
possess was much more urgently required for purposes of internal
development, and the impoverished agricultural population ought not to be
drained of their last meagre reserves for the sake of gigantic political
schemes which did not directly contribute to their material welfare. To this
the enthusiastic advocates of the forward policy replied that the national
finances had never been in such a prosperous condition, that the revenue
was increasing by leaps and bounds, that the money invested in the
proposed enterprise would soon be repaid with interest; and that if Russia
did not at once seize the opportunity she would find herself forestalled by
energetic rivals. There was still, however, one formidable objection. Such
an enormous increase of Russia's power in the Far East would inevitably
arouse the jealousy and opposition of other Powers, especially of Japan, for
whom the future of Korea and Manchuria was a question of life and death.
Here again these advocates of the forward policy had their answer ready.
They declared that the danger was more apparent than real. In Far-Eastern
diplomacy the European Powers could not compete with Russia, and they
might easily be bought off by giving them a very modest share of the spoil;
as for Japan, she was not formidable, for she was just emerging from
Oriental barbarism, and all her boasted progress was nothing more than a
thin veneer of European civilisation. As the Moscow patriots on the eve of
the Crimean War said contemptuously of the Allies, "We have only to throw
our hats at them," so now the believers in Russia's historic mission in the
Far East spoke of their future opponents as "monkeys" and "parrots."
The war between China and Japan in 1894-5, terminating in the Treaty of
Shimonoseki, which ceded to Japan the Liaotung Peninsula, showed Russia
that if she was not to be forestalled she must be up and doing. She

Page 684

accordingly formed a coalition with France and Germany, and compelled
Japan to withdraw from the mainland, on the pretext that the integrity of
China must be maintained. In this way China recovered, for a moment, a bit
of lost territory, and further benefits were conferred on her by a guarantee
for a foreign loan, and by the creation of the Russo-Chinese Bank, which
would assist her in her financial affairs. For these and other favours she was
expected to be grateful, and it was suggested to her that her gratitude might
take the form of facilitating the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway.
If constructed wholly on Russian territory the line would have to make an
enormous bend to the northward, whereas if it went straight from Lake
Baikal to Vladivostok it would be very much shorter, and would confer a
very great benefit on the north-eastern provinces of the Celestial Empire.
This benefit, moreover, might be greatly increased by making a branch line
to Talienwan and Port Arthur, which would some day be united with
Peking. Gradually Li-Hung-Chang and other influential Chinese officials
were induced to sympathise with the scheme, and a concession was granted
for the direct line to Vladivostok through Chinese territory.
The retrocession of the Liaotung Peninsula had not been effected by
Russia alone. Germany and France had co-operated, and they also expected
from China a mark of gratitude in some tangible form. On this point the
statesmen of Berlin held very strong views, and they thought it advisable to
obtain a material guarantee for the fulfilment of their expectations by
seizing Kiaochau, on the ground that German missionaries had been
murdered by Chinese fanatics.
For Russia this was a most unwelcome incident. She had earmarked
Kiaochau for her own purposes, and had already made an agreement with
the authorities in Peking that the harbour might be used freely by her fleet.
And this was not the worst. The incident might inaugurate an era of
partition for which she was not yet prepared, and another port which she
had earmarked for her own use might be seized by a rival. Already English
ships of war were reported to be prowling about in the vicinity of the
Liaotung Peninsula. She hastened to demand, therefore, as a set-off for the
loss of Kiaochau, a lease of Port Arthur and Talienwan, and a railway
concession to unite these ports with the Trans-Siberian Railway. The
Chinese Government was too weak to think of refusing the demands, and
the process of gradually absorbing Manchuria began, in accordance with a
plan already roughly sketched out in St. Petersburg.

Page 685

In the light of a few authentic documents and many subsequent events,
the outline of this plan can be traced with tolerable accuracy. In the region
through which the projected railways were to run there was a large
marauding population, and consequently the labourers and the works would
have to be protected; and as Chinese troops can never be thoroughly relied
on, the protecting force must be Russian. Under this rather transparent
disguise a small army of occupation could be gradually introduced, and in
establishing a modus vivendi between it and the Chinese civil and military
authorities a predominant influence in the local administration could be
established. At the same time, by energetic diplomatic action at Peking,
which would be brought within striking-distance by the railways, all rival
foreign influences might be excluded from the occupied provinces, and the
rest might be left to the action of "spontaneous infiltration." Thus, while
professing to uphold the principle of the territorial integrity of the Celestial
Empire, the Cabinet of St. Petersburg might practically annex the whole of
Manchuria and transform Port Arthur into a great naval port and arsenal, a
far more effectual "Dominator of the East" than Vladivostok, which was
intended, as its name implies, to fulfil that function. From Manchuria the
political influence and the spontaneous infiltration would naturally extend
to Korea, and on the deeply indented coast of the Hermit Kingdom new
ports and arsenals, far more spacious and strategically more important than
Port Arthur, might be constructed.
The grandiose scheme was carefully laid, and for a time it was favoured
by circumstances. In 1900 the Boxer troubles justified Russia in sending a
large force into Manchuria, and enabled her subsequently to play the part of
China's protector against the inordinate demands of the Western Powers for
compensation and guarantees. For a moment it seemed as if the slow
process of gradual infiltration might be replaced by a more expeditious
mode of annexation. As the dexterous diplomacy of Ignatief in 1858 had
induced the Son of Heaven to cede to Russia the rich Primorsk provinces
between the Amur and the sea, as compensation for Russian protection
against the English and French, who had burnt his Summer Palace, so his
successor might now perhaps be induced to cede Manchuria to the Tsar for
similar reasons.
No such cession actually took place, but the Russian diplomatists in
Peking could use the gratitude argument in support of their demands for an
extension of the rights and privileges of the "temporary" occupation; and

Page 686

when China sought to resist the pressure by leaning on the rival Powers she
found them to be little better than broken reeds. France could not openly
oppose her ally, and Germany had reasons of her own for conciliating the
Tsar, whilst England and the United States, though avowedly opposing the
scheme as dangerous to their commercial interests, were not prepared to go
to war in defence of their policy. It seemed, therefore, that by patience,
tenacity and diplomatic dexterity Russia might ultimately attain her ends;
but a surprise was in store for her. There was one Power which recognised
that her own vital interests were at stake, and which was ready to undertake
a life-and-death struggle in defence of them.
Though still smarting under the humiliation of her expulsion from the
Liaotung Peninsula in 1895, and watching with the keenest interest every
move in the political game, Japan had remained for some time in the
background, and had confined her efforts to resisting Russian influence in
Korea and supporting diplomatically the Powers who were upholding the
policy of the open door. Now, when it had become evident that the Western
Powers would not prevent the realisation of the Russian scheme, she
determined to intervene energetically, and to stake her national existence on
the result. Ever since 1895 she had been making military and naval
preparations for the day of the revanche, and now that day was at hand.
Against the danger of a coalition such as had checkmated her on the
previous occasion she was protected by the alliance which she had
concluded with England in 1902, and she felt confident that with Russia
alone she was quite capable of dealing single-handed. Her position is
briefly and graphically described in a despatch, telegraphed at that time
(28th July, 1903) by the Japanese Government to its representative at St.
Petersburg, instructing him to open negotiations:
"The recent conduct of Russia in making new demands at Peking and
tightening her hold upon Manchuria has led the Imperial Government to
believe that she must have abandoned her intention of retiring from that
province. At the same time, her increased activity upon the Korean frontier
is such as to raise doubts as to the limits of her ambition. The unconditional
and permanent occupation of Manchuria by Russia would create a state of
things prejudicial to the security and interests of Japan. The principle of
equal opportunity (the open door) would thereby be annulled, and the
territorial integrity of China impaired. There is, however, a still more
serious consideration for the Japanese Government. If Russia were

Page 687

established on the flank of Korea she would constantly menace the separate
existence of that Empire, or at least exercise in it a predominant influence;
and as Japan considers Korea an important outpost in her line of defence,
she regards its independence as absolutely essential to her own repose and
safety. Moreover, the political as well as commercial and industrial interests
and influence which Japan possesses in Korea are paramount over those of
other Powers; she cannot, having regard to her own security, consent to
surrender them to, or share them with, another Power."
In accordance with this view of the situation the Japanese Government
informed Count Lamsdorff that, as it desired to remove from the relations
of the two Empires every cause of future misunderstanding, it would be
glad to enter with the Imperial Russian Government upon an examination of
the condition of affairs in the Far East, with a view to defining the
respective special interests of the two countries in those regions.
Though Count Lamsdorff accepted the proposal with apparent cordiality
and professed to regard it as a means of preventing any outsider from
sowing the seeds of discord between the two countries, the idea of a general
discussion was not at all welcome. Careful definition of respective interests
was the last thing the Russian Government desired. Its policy was to keep
the whole situation in a haze until it had consolidated its position in
Manchuria and on the Korean frontier to such an extent that it could dictate
its own terms in any future arrangement. It could not, however, consistently
with its oft-repeated declarations of disinterestedness and love of peace,
decline to discuss the subject. It consented, therefore, to an exchange of
views, but in order to ensure that the tightening of its hold on the territories
in question should proceed pari passu with the diplomatic action, it made an
extraordinary departure from ordinary procedure, entrusting the conduct of
the affair, not to Count Lamsdorff and the Foreign Office, but to Admiral
Alexeyef, the newly created Viceroy of the Far East, in whom was vested
the control of all civil, military, naval, and diplomatic affairs relating to that
part of the world.
From the commencement of the negotiations, which lasted from August
12th, 1903, to February 6th, 1904, the irreconcilable differences of the two
rivals became apparent, and all through the correspondence, in which a few
apparent concessions were offered by Japan, neither Power retreated a step
from the positions originally taken up. What Japan suggested was, roughly

Page 688

speaking, a mutual engagement to uphold the independence and integrity of
the Chinese and Korean empires, and at the same time a bilateral
arrangement by which the special interests of the two contracting parties in
Manchuria and in Korea should be formally recognised, and the means of
protecting them clearly defined. The scheme did not commend itself to the
Russians. They systematically ignored the interests of Japan in Manchuria,
and maintained that she had no right to interfere in any arrangements they
might think fit to make with the Chinese Government with regard to that
province. In their opinion, Japan ought to recognise formally that
Manchuria lay outside her sphere of interest, and the negotiations should be
confined to limiting her freedom of action in Korea.
With such a wide divergence in principle the two parties were not likely
to agree in matters of detail. Their conflicting aims came out most clearly in
the question of the open door. The Japanese insisted on obtaining the
privileges of the open door, including the right of settlement in Manchuria,
and Russia obstinately refused. Having marked out Manchuria as a close
reserve for her own colonisation, trade, and industry, and knowing that she
could not compete with the Japanese if they were freely admitted, she could
not adopt the principle of "equal opportunity" which her rivals
recommended. A fidus achates of Admiral Alexeyef explained to me quite
frankly, during the negotiations, why no concessions could be made on that
point. In the work of establishing law and order in Manchuria, constructing
roads, bridges, railways, and towns, Russia had expended an enormous sum
—estimated by Count Cassini at 60,000,000 pounds—and until that capital
was recovered, or until a reasonable interest was derived from the
investment, Russia could not think of sharing with any one the fruits of the
prosperity which she had created.
We need not go further into the details of the negotiations. Japan soon
convinced herself that the onward march of the Colossus was not to be
stopped by paper barricades, and knowing well that her actual military and
naval superiority was being rapidly diminished by Russia's warlike
preparations,* she suddenly broke off diplomatic relations and commenced
hostilities.

* According to an estimate made by the Japanese authorities,
between April, 1903, and the outbreak of the war, Russia
increased her naval and military forces in the Far East by
nineteen war vessels, aggregating 82,415 tons, and 40,000

Page 689

soldiers. In addition to this, one battleship, three
cruisers, seven torpedo destroyers, and four torpedo boats,
aggregating about 37,040 tons, were on their way to the
East, and preparations had been made for increasing the land
forces by 200,000 men. For further details, see Asakawa,
"The Russo-Japanese Conflict" (London, 1904), pp. 352-54.

Russia thus found herself engaged in a war of the first magnitude, of
which no one can predict the ultimate consequences, and the question
naturally arises as to why, with an Emperor who lately aspired to play in
politics the part of a great peacemaker, she provoked a conflict, for which
she was very imperfectly prepared—imposing on herself the obligation of
defending a naval fortress, hastily constructed on foreign territory, and
united with her base by a single line of railway 6,000 miles long. The
question is easily answered: she did not believe in the possibility of war.
The Emperor was firmly resolved that he would not attack Japan, and no
one would admit for a moment that Japan could have the audacity to attack
the great Russian Empire. In the late autumn of 1903, it is true, a few well-
informed officials in St. Petersburg, influenced by the warnings of Baron
Rosen, the Russian Minister in Tokio, began to perceive that perhaps Japan
would provoke a conflict, but they were convinced that the military and
naval preparations already made were quite sufficient to repel the attack.
One of these officials—probably the best informed of all—said to me quite
frankly: "If Japan had attacked us in May or June, we should have been in a
sorry plight, but now [November, 1903] we are ready."
The whole past history of territoral expansion in Asia tended to confirm
the prevailing illusions. Russia had advanced steadily from the Ural and the
Caspian to the Hindu Kush and the Northern Pacific without once
encountering serious resistance. Not once had she been called on to make a
great national effort, and the armed resistance of the native races had never
inflicted on her anything worse than pin-pricks. From decrepit China, which
possessed no army in the European sense of the term, a more energetic
resistance was not to be expected. Had not Muravieff Amurski with a few
Cossacks quietly occupied her Amur territories without provoking anything
more dangerous than a diplomatic protest; and had not Ignatief annexed her
rich Primorsk provinces, including the site of Vladivostok, by purely
diplomatic means? Why should not Count Cassini, a diplomatist of the
same type as Ignatief, imitate his adroit predecessor, and secure for Russia,
if not the formal annexation, at least the permanent occupation, of
Manchuria? Remembering all this, we can perceive that the great mistake of

Page 690

the Russian Government is not so very difficult to explain. It certainly did
not want war—far from it—but it wanted to obtain Manchuria by a gradual,
painless process of absorption, and it did not perceive that this could not be
attained without a life-and-death struggle with a young, vigorous
nationality, which has contrived to combine the passions and virtues of a
primitive race with the organising powers and scientific appliances of the
most advanced civilisation.
Russian territorial expansion has thus been checked, for some years to
come, on the Pacific coast; but the expansive tendency will re-appear soon
in other regions, and it behooves us to be watchful, because, whatever
direction it may take, it is likely to affect our interests directly or indirectly.
Will it confine itself for some years to a process of infiltration in Mongolia
and Northern Thibet, the line of least resistance? Or will it impinge on our
Indian frontier, directed by those who desire to avenge themselves on
Japan's ally for the reverses sustained in Manchuria? Or will it once more
take the direction of the Bosphorous, where a campaign might be expected
to awaken religious and warlike enthusiasm among the masses? To these
questions I cannot give any answer, because so much depends on the
internal consequences of the present war, and on accidental circumstances
which no one can at present foresee. I have always desired, and still desire,
that we should cultivate friendly relations with our great rival, and that we
should learn to appreciate the many good qualities of her people; but I have
at the same time always desired that we should keep a watchful eye on her
irrepressible tendency to expand, and that we should take timely
precautions against any unprovoked aggression, however justifiable it may
seem to her from the point of view of her own national interests.

Page 691

CHAPTER XXXIX
THE PRESENT SITUATION

Reform or Revolution?—Reigns of Alexander II. and Nicholas II.
Compared and Contrasted—The Present Opposition—Various Groups—
The Constitutionalists—Zemski Sobors—The Young Tsar Dispels Illusions
—Liberal Frondeurs—Plehve's Repressive Policy—Discontent Increased
by the War—Relaxation and Wavering under Prince Mirski—Reform
Enthusiasm—The Constitutionalists Formulate their Demands—The Social
Democrats—Father Gapon's Demonstration—The Socialist-Revolutionaries
—The Agrarian Agitators—The Subject-Nationalities—Numerical Strength
of the Various Groups—All United on One Point—Their Different Aims—
Possible Solutions of the Crisis—Difficulties of Introducing Constitutional
Regime—A Strong Man Wanted—Uncertainty of the Future.
Is history about to repeat itself, or are we on the eve of a cataclysm? Is
the reign of Nicholas II. to be, in its main lines, a repetition of the reign of
Alexander II., or is Russia about to enter on an entirely new phase of her
political development?
To this momentous question I do not profess to give a categorical answer.
If it be true, even in ordinary times, that "of all forms of human folly,
prediction is the most gratuitous," it is especially true at a moment like the
present, when we are constantly reminded of the French proverb that there
is nothing certain but the unforeseen. All I can hope to do is to throw a little
light on the elements of the problem, and allow the reader to draw his own
conclusions.
Between the present situation and the early part of Alexander II.'s reign
there is undoubtedly a certain analogy. In both cases we find in the educated
classes a passionate desire for political liberty, generated by long years of a
stern, autocratic regime, and stimulated by military disasters for which
autocracy is held responsible; and in both cases we find the throne occupied
by a Sovereign of less accentuated political convictions and less energetic
character than his immediate predecessor. In the earlier case, the autocrat,
showing more perspicacity and energy than were expected of him, guides

Page 692

and controls the popular enthusiasm, and postpones the threatened political
crisis by effecting a series of far reaching and beneficent reforms. In the
present case . . . the description of the result must be left to future
historians. For the moment, all we can say is that between the two situations
there are as many points of difference as of analogy. After the Crimean War
the enthusiasm was of a vague, eclectic kind, and consequently it could find
satisfaction in practical administrative reforms not affecting the essence of
the Autocratic Power, the main pivot round which the Empire has revolved
for centuries. Now, on the contrary, it is precisely on this pivot that the
reform enthusiasm is concentrated. Mere bureaucratic reforms can no
longer give satisfaction. All sections of the educated classes, with the
exception of a small group of Conservative doctrinaires, insist on obtaining
a controlling influence in the government of the country, and demand that
the Autocratic Power, if not abolished, shall be limited by parliamentary
institutions of a democratic type.
Another difference between the present and the past, is that those who
now clamour for radical changes are more numerous, more courageous, and
better organised than their predecessors, and they are consequently better
able to bring pressure to bear on the Government. Formerly the would-be
reformers were of two categories; on the one hand, the Constitutionalists,
who remained within the bounds of legality, and confined themselves to
inserting vague hints in loyal addresses to the Tsar and making mild
political demonstrations; and on the other hand, the so-called Nihilists, who
talked about organising society on Socialistic principles, and who hoped to
attain their object by means of secret associations. With both of these
groups, as soon as they became aggressive, the Government had no
difficulty in dealing effectually. The leading Constitutionalists were simply
reprimanded or ordered to remain for a time in their country houses, while
the more active revolutionaries were exiled, imprisoned, or compelled to
take refuge abroad. All this gave the police a good deal of trouble,
especially when the Nihilists took to Socialist propaganda among the
common people, and to acts of terrorism against the officials; but the
existence of the Autocratic Power was never seriously endangered.
Nowadays the Liberals have no fear of official reprimands, and openly
disregard the orders of the authorities about holding meetings and making
speeches, while a large section of the Socialists proclaim themselves a

Page 693

Social Democratic party, enrol large numbers of working men, organise
formidable strikes, and make monster demonstrations leading to bloodshed.
Let us now examine this new Opposition a little more closely. We can
perceive at a glance that it is composed of two sections, differing widely
from each other in character and aims. On the one hand, there are the
Liberals, who desire merely political reforms of a more or less democratic
type; on the other, there are the Socialists, who aim at transforming
thoroughly the existing economic organisation of Society, and who, if they
desire parliamentary institutions at all, desire them simply as a stepping
stone to the realisation of the Socialist ideal. Behind the Socialists, and to
some extent mingling with them, stand a number of men belonging to the
various subject-nationalities, who have placed themselves under the
Socialist banner, but who hold, more or less concealed, their little national
flags, ready to be unfurled at the proper moment.
Of these three sections of the Opposition, the most numerous and the best
prepared to undertake the functions and responsibilities of government is
that of the Liberals. The movement which they represent began
immediately after the Crimean War, when the upper ranks of society,
smarting under defeat and looking about for the cause of the military
disasters, came to the conclusion that Autocracy had been put to a crucial
test, and found wanting. The outburst of patriotic indignation at that time
and the eager desire for a more liberal regime have been described in
previous chapters. For a moment the more sanguine critics of the
Government imagined that the Autocratic Power, persuaded of its own
inefficiency, would gladly accept the assistance of the educated classes, and
would spontaneously transform itself into a Constitutional Monarchy. In
reality Alexander II. had no such intentions. He was resolved to purify the
administration and to reform as far as possible all existing abuses, and he
seemed ready at first to listen to the advice and accept the co-operation of
his faithful subjects; but he had not the slightest intention of limiting his
supreme authority, which he regarded as essential to the existence of the
Empire. As soon as the landed proprietors began to complain that the great
question of serf emancipation was being taken out of their hands by the
bureaucracy, he reminded them that "in Russia laws are made by the
Autocratic Power," and when the more courageous Marshals of Noblesse
ventured to protest against the unceremonious manner in which the nobles

Page 694

were being treated by the tchinovniks, some of them were officially
reprimanded and others were deposed.
The indignation produced by this procedure, in which the Tsar identified
himself with the bureaucracy, was momentarily appeased by the decision of
the Government to entrust to the landed proprietors the carrying out of the
Emancipation law, and by the confident hope that political rights would be
granted them as compensation for the material sacrifices they had made for
the good of the State; but when they found that this confident hope was an
illusion, the indignation and discontent reappeared.
There was still, however, a ray of hope. Though the Autocratic Power
was evidently determined not to transform itself at once into a limited
Constitutional Monarchy, it might make concessions in the sphere of local
self-government. At that moment it was creating the Zemstvo, and the
Constitutionalists hoped that these new institutions, though restricted
legally to the sphere of purely economic wants, might gradually acquire a
considerable political influence. Learned Germans had proved that in
England, "the mother of modern Constitutionalism," it was on local self-
government that the political liberties were founded, and the Slavophils
now suggested that by means of an ancient institution called the Zemski
Sobor, the Zemstvo might gradually and naturally acquire a political
character in accordance with Russian historic development. As this idea has
often been referred to in recent discussions, I may explain briefly what the
ancient institution in question was.
In the Tsardom of Muscovy during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries representative assemblies were occasionally called together to
deal with matters of exceptional importance, such as the election of a Tsar
when the throne became vacant, a declaration of war, the conclusion of a
peace, or the preparation of a new code of laws. Some fifteen assemblies of
the kind were convoked in the space of about a century (1550-1653). They
were composed largely of officials named by the Government, but they
contained also some representatives of the unofficial classes. Their
procedure was peculiar. When a speech from the throne had been read by
the Tsar or his representative, explaining the question to be decided, the
assembly transformed itself into a large number of commissions, and each
commission had to give in writing its opinion regarding the questions
submitted to it. The opinions thus elicited were codified by the officials and

Page 695

submitted to the Tsar, and he was free to adopt or reject them, as he thought
fit. We may say, therefore, that the Zemski Sobor was merely consultative
and had no legislative power; but we must add that it was allowed a certain
initiative, because it was permitted to submit to the Tsar humble petitions
regarding anything which it considered worthy of attention.
Alexander II. might have adopted this Slavophil idea and used the
Zemski Sobor as a means of transition from pure autocracy to a more
modern system of government, but he had no sooner created the Zemstvo
than he thought it necessary, as we have seen, to clip its wings, and dispel
its political ambition. By this repressive policy the frondeur spirit of the
Noblesse was revived, and it has continued to exist down to the present
time. On each occasion when I revisited Russia and had an opportunity of
feeling the pulse of public opinion, between 1876 and 1903, I noticed that
the dissatisfaction with the traditional methods of government, and the
desire of the educated classes to obtain a share of the political power,
notwithstanding short periods of apparent apathy, were steadily spreading in
area and increasing in intensity, and I often heard predictions that a
disastrous foreign war like the Crimean campaign would probably bring
about the desired changes. Of those who made such predictions not a few
showed clearly that, though patriotic enough in a certain sense, they would
not regret any military disaster which would have the effect they
anticipated. Progress in the direction of political emancipation,
accompanied by radical improvements in the administration, was evidently
regarded as much more important and desirable than military prestige or
extension of territory.
During the first part of the Turkish campaign of 1877-78, when the
Russian armies were repulsed in Bulgaria and Asia Minor, the hostility to
autocracy was very strong, and the famous acquittal of Vera Zasulitch, who
had attempted to assassinate General Trepof, caused widespread satisfaction
among people who were not themselves revolutionaries and who did not
approve of such violent methods of political struggle. Towards the end of
the war, when the tide of fortune had turned both in Europe and in Asia, and
the Russian army was encamped under the walls of Constantinople, within
sight of St. Sophia, the Chauvinist feelings gained the upper hand, and they
were greatly intensified by the Congress of Berlin, which deprived Russia
of some fruits of her victories.

Page 696

This change in public feeling and the horror excited by the assassination
of Alexander II. prepared the way for Alexander III.'s reign (1881-94),
which was a period of political stagnation. He was a man of strong
character, and a vigorous ruler who believed in Autocracy as he did in the
dogmas of his Church; and very soon after his accession he gave it clearly
to be understood that he would permit no limitations of the Autocratic
Power. The men with Liberal aspirations knew that nothing would make
him change his mind on that subject, and that any Liberal demonstrations
would merely confirm him in his reactionary tendencies. They accordingly
remained quiet and prudently waited for better times.
The better times were supposed to have come when Nicholas II.
ascended the throne in November, 1894, because it was generally assumed
that the young Tsar, who was known to be humane and well-intentioned,
would inaugurate a more liberal policy. Before he had been three months on
the throne he summarily destroyed these illusions. On 17th (29th) January,
1895, when receiving deputies from the Noblesse, the Zemstvo, and the
municipalities, who had come to St. Petersburg to congratulate him on his
marriage, he declared his confidence in the sincerity of the loyal feelings
which the delegates expressed; and then, to the astonishment of all present,
he added: "It is known to me that recently, in some Zemstvo assemblies,
were heard the voices of people who had let themselves be carried away by
absurd dreams of the Zemstvo representatives taking part in the affairs of
internal administration; let them know that I, devoting all my efforts to the
prosperity of the nation, will preserve the principles of autocracy as firmly
and unswervingly as my late father of imperishable memory."
These words, pronounced by the young ruler at the commencement of his
reign, produced profound disappointment and dissatisfaction in all sections
of the educated classes, and from that moment the frondeur spirit began to
show itself more openly than at any previous period. In the case of some
people of good social position it took the unusual form of speaking
disrespectfully of his Majesty. Others supposed that the Emperor had
simply repeated words prepared for him by the Minister of the Interior, and
this idea spread rapidly, till hostility to the bureaucracy became universal.
This feeling reached its climax when the Ministry of the Interior was
confided to M. Plehve. His immediate predecessors, though sincere
believers in autocracy and very hostile to Liberalism of all kinds,

Page 697

considered that the Liberal ideas might be rendered harmless by firm
passive resistance and mild reactionary measures. He, on the contrary, took
a more alarmist view of the situation. His appointment coincided with the
revival of terrorism, and he believed that autocracy was in danger. To save
it, the only means was, in his opinion, a vigorous, repressive police
administration, and as he was a man of strong convictions and exceptional
energy, he screwed up his system of police supervision to the sticking-point
and applied it to the Liberals as well as to the terrorists. In the year 1903, if
we may credit information which comes from an apparently trustworthy
source, no less than 1,988 political affairs were initiated by the police, and
4,867 persons were condemned inquisitorially to various punishments
without any regular trial.
Whilst this unpopular rigorism was in full force the war unexpectedly
broke out, and added greatly to the existing discontent.
Very few people in Russia had been following closely the recent
developments of the Far Eastern Question, and still fewer understood their
importance. There seemed to be nothing abnormal in what was taking place.
Russia was expanding, and would continue to expand indefinitely, in that
direction, without any strenuous effort on her part. Of course the English
would try to arrest her progress as usual by diplomatic notes, but their
efforts would be as futile as they had been on all previous occasions. They
might incite the Japanese to active resistance, but Japan would not commit
the insane folly of challenging her giant rival to mortal combat. The whole
question could be settled in accordance with Russian interests, as so many
similar questions had been settled in the past, by a little skilful diplomacy;
and Manchuria could be absorbed, as the contiguous Chinese provinces had
been forty years ago, without the necessity of going to war.
When these comforting illusions were suddenly destroyed by the rupture
of diplomatic relations and the naval attack on Port Arthur, there was an
outburst of indignant astonishment. At first the indignation was directed
against Japan and England, but it soon turned against the home
Government, which had made no adequate preparations for the struggle,
and it was intensified by current rumours that the crisis had been wantonly
provoked by certain influential personages for purely personal reasons.
How far the accounts of the disorders in the military organisation and the
rumours about pilfering in high quarters were true, we need not inquire.

Page 698

True or false, they helped greatly to make the war unpopular, and to
stimulate the desire for political changes. Under a more liberal and
enlightened regime such things were supposed to be impossible, and, as at
the time of the Crimean War, public opinion decided that autocracy was
being tried, and found wanting.
So long as the stern, uncompromising Plehve was at the Ministry of the
Interior, enjoying the Emperor's confidence and directing the police
administration, public opinion was prudent and reserved in its utterances,
but when he was assassinated by a terrorist (July 28th, 1904), and was
succeeded by Prince Sviatopolk Mirski, a humane man of Liberal views, the
Constitutionalists thought that the time had come for making known their
grievances and demands, and for bringing pressure to bear on the Emperor.
First came forward the leading members of the Zemstvos. After some
preliminary consultation they assembled in St. Petersburg, with the consent
of the authorities, in the hope that they would be allowed to discuss publicly
the political wants of the country, and prepare the draft of a Constitution.
Their wishes were only partially acceded to. They were informed semi-
officially that their meetings must be private, but that they might send their
resolutions to the Minister of the Interior for transmission to his Majesty. A
memorandum was accordingly drawn up and signed on November 21st by
102 out of the 104 representatives present.
This hesitating attitude on the part of the Government encouraged other
sections of the educated classes to give expression to their long pent-up
political aspirations. On the heels of the Zemstvo delegates appeared the
barristers, who discussed the existing evils from the juridical point of view,
and prescribed what they considered the necessary remedies. Then came
municipalities of the large towns, corporations of various kinds, academic
leagues, medical faculties, learned societies, and miscellaneous gatherings,
all demanding reforms. Great banquets were organised, and very strong
speeches, which would have led in Plehve's time to the immediate arrest of
the orators, were delivered and published without provoking police
intervention.
In the memorandum presented to the Minister of the Interior by the
Zemstvo Congress, and in the resolutions passed by the other corporate
bodies, we see reflected the grievances and aspirations of the great majority
of the educated classes.

Page 699

The theory propounded in these documents is that a lawless, arbitrary
bureaucracy, which seeks to exclude the people from all participation in the
management of public affairs, has come between the nation and the
Supreme Power, and that it is necessary to eliminate at once this baneful
intermediary and inaugurate the so-called "reign of law." For this purpose
the petitioners and orators demanded:
(1) Inviolability of person and domicile, so that no one should be
troubled by the police without a warrant from an independent magistrate,
and no one punished without a regular trial;
(2) Freedom of conscience, of speech, and of the Press, together with the
right of holding public meetings and forming associations;
(3) Greater freedom and increased activity of the local self-government,
rural and municipal;
(4) An assembly of freely elected representatives, who should participate
in the legislative activity and control the administration in all its branches;
(5) The immediate convocation of a constituent assembly, which should
frame a Constitution on these lines.
Of these requirements the last two are considered by far the most
important. The truth is that the educated classes have come to be possessed
of an ardent desire for genuine parliamentary institutions on a broad,
democratic basis, and neither improvements in the bureaucratic
organisation, nor even a Zemski Sobor in the sense of a Consultative
Assembly, would satisfy them. They imagine that with a full-fledged
constitution they would be guaranteed, not only against administrative
oppression, but even against military reverses such as they have recently
experienced in the Far East—an opinion in which those who know by
experience how military unreadiness and inefficiency can be combined with
parliamentary institutions will hardly feel inclined to concur.
It may surprise English readers to learn that the corruption and venality
of the civil and military administration, of which we have recently heard so
much, are nowhere mentioned in the complaints and remonstrances; but the
fact is easily accounted for. Though corrupt practices undoubtedly exist in
some branches of the public service, they are not so universal as is
commonly supposed in Western Europe; and the Russian reformers
evidently consider that the purifying of the administration is less urgent

Page 700

than the acquisition of political liberties, or that under an enlightened
democratic regime the existing abuses would spontaneously disappear.
The demands put forward in St. Petersburg did not meet with universal
approval in Moscow. There they seemed excessive and un-Russian, and an
attempt was made to form a more moderate party. In the ancient Capital of
the Tsars even among the Liberals there are not a few who have a
sentimental tenderness for the Autocratic Power, and they argue that
parliamentary government would be very dangerous in a country which is
still far from being homogeneous or compact. To maintain the integrity of
the Empire, and to hold the balance equally between the various races and
social classes of which the population is composed, it is necessary, they
think, to have some permanent authority above the sphere of party spirit and
electioneering strife. While admitting that the Government in its present
bureaucratic form is unsatisfactory and stands in need of being enlightened
by the unofficial classes, they think that a Consultative Assembly on the
model of the old Zemski Sobors would be infinitely better suited to Russian
wants than a Parliament such as that which sits at Westminster.
For a whole month the Government took little notice of the
unprecedented excitement and demonstrations. It was not till December
25th that a reply was given to the public demands. On that day the Emperor
signed an ukaz in which he enumerated the reforms which he considered
most urgent, and instructed the Committee of Ministers to prepare the
requisite legislation. The list of reforms coincided to a certain extent with
the demands formulated by the Zemstvos, but the document as a whole
produced profound disappointment, because it contained no mention of a
National Assembly. To those who could read between the lines the attitude
of the Emperor seemed perfectly clear. He was evidently desirous of
introducing very considerable reforms, but he was resolved that they must
be effected by the unimpaired Autocratic Power in the old bureaucratic
fashion, without any participation of the unofficial world.
To obviate any misconception on this point, the Government published,
simultaneously with the ukaz, an official communication in which it
condemned the agitation and excitement, and warned the Zemstvos,
municipalities, and other corporate bodies that in discussing political
questions they were overstepping the limits of their legally-defined
functions and exposing themselves to the rigours of the law.

Page 701

As might have been foreseen, the ukaz and the circular had not at all the
desired effect of "introducing the necessary tranquillity into public life,
which has lately been diverted from its normal course." On the contrary,
they increased the excitement, and evoked a new series of public
demonstrations. On December 27th, the very day on which the two official
documents were published—the Provincial Zemstvo of Moscow, openly
disregarding the ministerial warnings, expressed the conviction that the day
was near when the bureaucratic regime, which had so long estranged the
Supreme Power from the people, would be changed, and when freely-
elected representatives of the people would take part in legislation. The
same evening, at St. Petersburg, a great Liberal banquet was held, at which
a resolution was voted condemning the war, and declaring that Russia could
be extricated from her difficulties only by the representatives of the nation,
freely elected by secret ballot. As an encouragement to the organs of local
administration to persevere in their disregard of ministerial instructions, the
St. Petersburg Medical Society, after adopting the programme of the
Zemstvo Congress, sent telegrams of congratulation to the Mayor of
Moscow and the President of the Tchernigof Zemstvo bureau, both of
whom had incurred the displeasure of the Government. A similar telegram
was sent by a Congress of 496 engineers to the Moscow Town Council, in
which the burning political questions had been freely discussed. In other
large towns, when the mayor prevented such discussions, a considerable
number of the town councillors resigned.
From the Zemstvos and municipalities the spirit of opposition spread to
the provincial assemblies of the Noblesse. The nobles of the province of St.
Petersburg, for example, voted by a large majority an address to the Tsar
recommending the convocation of a freely-elected National Assembly; and
in Moscow, usually regarded as the fortress of Conservatism, eighty
members of the Assembly entered a formal protest against a patriotic
Conservative address which had been voted two days before. Even the fair
sex considered it necessary to support the opposition movement. The
matrons of Moscow, in a humble petition to the Empress, declared that they
could not continue to bring up their children properly in the existing state of
unconstitutional lawlessness, and their view was endorsed in several
provincial towns by the schoolboys, who marched through the streets in
procession, and refused to learn their lessons until popular liberties had
been granted!

Page 702

Again, for more than a month the Government remained silent on the
fundamental questions which were exercising the public mind. At last, on
the morning of March 3d, appeared an Imperial manifesto of a very
unexpected kind. In it the Emperor deplored the outbreak of internal
disturbances at a moment when the glorious sons of Russia were fighting
with self-sacrificing bravery and offering their lives for the Faith, the Tsar,
and the Fatherland; but he drew consolation and hope from remembering
that, with the help of the prayers of the Holy Orthodox Church, under the
banner of the Tsar's autocratic might, Russia had frequently passed through
great wars and internal troubles, and had always issued from them with
fresh strength. He appealed, therefore, to all right-minded subjects, to
whatever class they might belong, to join him in the great and sacred task of
overcoming the stubborn foreign foe, and eradicating revolt at home. As for
the manner in which he hoped this might be accomplished, he gave a pretty
clear indication, at the end of the document, by praying to God, not only for
the welfare of his subjects, but also for "the consolidation of autocracy."
This extraordinary pronouncement, couched in semi-ecclesiastical
language, produced in the Liberal world feelings of surprise,
disappointment, and dismay. No one was more astonished and dismayed
than the Ministers, who had known nothing of the manifesto until they saw
it in the official Gazette. In the course of the forenoon they paid their usual
weekly visit to Tsarskoe Selo, and respectfully submitted to the Emperor
that such a document must have a deplorable effect on public opinion. In
consequence of their representations his Majesty consented to supplement
the manifesto by a rescript to the Minister of the Interior, in which he
explained that in carrying out his intentions for the welfare of his people the
Government was to have the co-operation of "the experienced elements of
the community." Then followed the memorable words: "I am resolved
henceforth, with the help of God, to convene the most worthy men,
possessing the confidence of the people and elected by them, in order that
they may participate in the preparation and consideration of legislative
measures." For the carrying out of this resolution a commission, or "special
conference," was to be at once convened, under the presidency of M.
Bulyghin, the Minister of the Interior.
The rescript softened the impression produced by the manifesto, but it
did not give general satisfaction, because it contained significant indications
that the Emperor, while promising to create an assembly of some kind, was

Page 703

still determined to maintain the Autocratic Power. So at least the public
interpreted a vague phase about the difficulty of introducing reforms "while
preserving absolutely the immutability of the fundamental laws of the
Empire." And this impression seemed to be confirmed by the fact that the
task of preparing the future representative institutions was confided, not to a
constituent assembly, but to a small commission composed chiefly or
entirely of officials.
In these circumstances the Liberals determined to continue the agitation.
The Bulyghin Commission was accordingly inundated with petitions and
addresses explaining the wants of the nation in general, and of various
sections of it in particular; and when the Minister declined to receive
deputations and discuss with them the aforesaid wants, the reform question
was taken up by a new series of congresses, composed of doctors, lawyers,
professors, journalists, etc. Even the higher ecclesiastical dignitaries woke
up for a moment from their accustomed lethargy, remembered how they had
lived for so many years under the rod of M. Pobedonostsef, recognised as
uncanonical such subordination to a layman, and petitioned for the
resurrection of the Patriarchate, which had been abolished by Peter the
Great.
On May 9th a new Zemstvo Congress was held in Moscow, and it at once
showed that since their November session in St. Petersburg the delegates
had made a decided movement to the Left. Those of them who had then led
the movement were now regarded as too Conservative. The idea of a
Zemski Sobor was discarded as insufficient for the necessities of the
situation, and strong speeches were made in support of a much more
democratic constitution.
It was thus becoming clearer every day that between the Liberals and the
Government there was an essential difference which could not be removed
by ordinary concessions. The Emperor proved that he was in favour of
reform by granting a very large measure of religious toleration, by
removing some of the disabilities imposed on the Poles, and allowing the
Polish language to be used in schools, and by confirming the proposals of
the Committee of Ministers to place the Press censure on a legal basis. But
these concessions to public opinion did not gain for him the sympathy and
support of his Liberal subjects. What they insisted on was a considerable
limitation of the Autocratic Power; and on that point the Emperor has

Page 704

hitherto shown himself inexorable. His firmness proceeds not from any
wayward desire to be able to do as he pleases, but from a hereditary respect
for a principle. From his boyhood he has been taught that Russia owes her
greatness and her security to her autocratic form of government, and that it
is the sacred duty of the Tsar to hand down intact to his successors the
power which he holds in trust for them.
While the Liberals were thus striving to attain their object without
popular disorders, and without any very serious infraction of the law,
Revolutionaries were likewise busy, working on different but parallel lines.
In the chapter on the present phase of the revolutionary movement I have
sketched briefly the origin and character of the two main Socialist groups,
and I have now merely to convey a general idea of their attitude during
recent events. And first, of the Social Democrats.
At the end of 1894 the Social Democrats were in what may be called
their normal condition—that is to say, they were occupied in organising and
developing the Labour Movement. The removal of Plehve, who had greatly
hampered them by his energetic police administration, enabled them to
work more freely, and they looked with a friendly eye on the efforts of the
Liberal Zemstvo-ists; but they took no part in the agitation, because the
Zemstvo world lay outside their sphere of action. In the labour world, to
which they confined their attention, they must have foreseen that a crisis
would sooner or later be produced by the war, and that they would then
have an excellent opportunity of preaching their doctrine that for all the
sufferings of the working classes the Government is responsible. What they
did not foresee was that serious labour troubles were so near at hand, and
that the conflict with the authorities would be accelerated by Father Gapon.
Accustomed to regard him as a persistent opponent, they did not expect him
to become suddenly an energetic, self-willed ally. Hence they were taken
unawares, and at first the direction of the movement was by no means
entirely in their hands. Very soon, however, they grasped the situation, and
utilised it for their own ends. It was in great measure due to their secret
organisation and activity that the strike in the Putilof Ironworks, which
might easily have been terminated amicably, spread rapidly not only to the
other works and factories in St. Petersburg, but also to those of Moscow,
Riga, Warsaw, Lodz, and other industrial centres. Though they did not
approve of Father Gapon's idea of presenting a petition to the Tsar, the loss

Page 705

of life which his demonstration occasioned was very useful to them in their
efforts to propagate the belief that the Autocratic Power is the ally of the
capitalists and hostile to the claims and aspirations of the working classes.
The other great Socialist group contributed much more largely towards
bringing about the present state of things. It was their Militant Organisation
that assassinated Plehve, and thereby roused the Liberals to action. To them,
likewise, is due the subsequent assassination of the Grand Duke Serge, and
it is an open secret that they are preparing other acts of terrorism of a
similar kind. At the same time they have been very active in creating
provincial revolutionary committees, in printing and distributing
revolutionary literature, and, above all, in organising agrarian disturbances,
which they intend to make a very important factor in the development of
events. Indeed, it is chiefly by agrarian disturbances that they hope to
overthrow the Autocratic Power and bring about the great economic and
social revolution to which the political revolution would be merely the
prologue.
Therein lies a serious danger.
After the failure of the propaganda and the insurrectionary agitation in
the seventies, it became customary in revolutionary circles to regard the
muzhik as impervious to Socialist ideas and insurrectionary excitement, but
the hope of eventually employing him in the cause never quite died out, and
in recent times, when his economic condition in many districts has become
critical, attempts have occasionally been made to embarrass the
Government by agrarian disturbances. The method usually employed is to
disseminate among the peasantry by oral propaganda, by printed or
hectographed leaflets, and by forged Imperial manifestoes, the belief that
the Tsar has ordered the land of the proprietors to be given to the rural
Communes, and that his benevolent wishes are being frustrated by the land-
owners and the officials. The forged manifesto is sometimes written in
letters of gold as a proof of its being genuine, and in one case which I heard
of in the province of Poltava, the revolutionary agent, wearing the uniform
of an aide-de-camp of the Emperor, induced the village priest to read the
document in the parish church.
The danger lies in the fact that, quite independent of revolutionary
activity, there has always been, since the time of the Emancipation, a
widespread belief among the peasantry that they would sooner or later

Page 706

receive the whole of the land. Successive Tsars have tried personally to
destroy this illusion, but their efforts have not been successful. Alexander
II., when passing through a province where the idea was very prevalent,
caused a number of village elders to be brought before him, and told them
in a threatening tone that they must remain satisfied with their allotments
and pay their taxes regularly; but the wily peasants could not be convinced
that the "General" who had talked to them in this sense was really the Tsar.
Alexander III. made a similar attempt at the time of his accession. To the
Volost elders collected together from all parts of the Empire, he said: "Do
not believe the foolish rumours and absurd reports about a redistribution of
the land, and addition to your allotments, and such like things. These
reports are disseminated by your enemies. Every kind of property, your own
included, must be inviolable." Recalling these words, Nicholas II.
confirmed them at his accession, and warned the peasants not to be led
astray by evil-disposed persons.
Notwithstanding these repeated warnings, the peasants still cling to the
idea that all the land belongs to them; and the Socialist-Revolutionaries now
announce publicly that they intend to use this belief for the purpose of
carrying out their revolutionary designs. In a pamphlet entitled "Concerning
Liberty and the Means of Obtaining it," they explain their plan of campaign.
Under the guidance of the revolutionary agents the peasants of each district
all over the Empire are to make it impossible for the proprietors to work
their estates, and then, after driving away the local authorities and rural
police, they are to take possession of the estates for their own use. The
Government, in its vain attempts to dislodge them, will have to employ all
the troops at its disposal, and this will give the working classes of the
towns, led by the revolutionists, an opportunity of destroying the most
essential parts of the administrative mechanism. Thus a great social
revolution can be successfully accomplished, and any Zemski Sobor or
Parliament which may be convoked will merely have to give a legislative
sanction to accomplished facts.
These three groups—the Liberals, the Social Democrats, and the Socialist
Revolutionaries—constitute what may be called the purely Russian
Opposition. They found their claims and justify their action on utilitarian
and philosophic grounds, and demand liberty (in various senses) for
themselves and others, independently of race and creed. This distinguishes
them from the fourth group, who claim to represent the subject-

Page 707

nationalities, and who mingle nationalist feelings and aspirations with
enthusiasm for liberty and justice in the abstract.
The policy of Russifying these subject-nationalities, which was
inaugurated by Alexander III. and maintained by his successor, has failed in
its object. It has increased the use of the Russian language in official
procedure, modified the system of instruction in the schools and
universities, and brought, nominally, a few schismatic and heretical sheep
into the Eastern Orthodox fold, but it has entirely failed to inspire the
subject-populations with Russian feeling and national patriotism; on the
contrary, it has aroused in them a bitter hostility to Russian nationality, and
to the Central Government. In such of them as have retained their old
aspirations of political independence—notably the Poles—the semi-latent
disaffection has been stimulated; and in those of them which, like the
Finlanders and the Armenians, desire merely to preserve the limited
autonomy they formerly enjoyed, a sentiment of disaffection has been
created. All of them know very well that in an armed struggle with the
dominant Russian nationality they would speedily be crushed, as the Poles
were in 1863. Their disaffection shows itself, therefore, merely in resistance
to the obligatory military service, and in an undisguised or thinly veiled
attitude of systematic hostility, which causes the Government some anxiety
and prevents it from sending to the Far East a large number of troops which
would otherwise be available. They hail, however, with delight the Liberal
and revolutionary movements in the hope that the Russians themselves may
undermine, and possibly overthrow, the tyrannical Autocratic Power.
Towards this end they would gladly co-operate, and they are endeavouring,
therefore, to get into touch with each other; but they have so little in
common, and so many mutually antagonistic interests, that they are not
likely to succeed in forming a solid coalition.
While sympathising with every form of opposition to the Government,
the men of the subject-nationalities reserve their special affection for the
Socialists, because these not only proclaim, like the Liberals, the principles
of extensive local self-government and universal equality before the law,
but they also speak of replacing the existing system of coercive
centralisation by a voluntary confederation of heterogeneous units. This
explains why so many Poles, Armenians and Georgians are to be found in
the ranks of the Social Democrats and the Socialist-Revolutionaries.

Page 708

Of the recruits from oppressed nationalities the great majority come from
the Jews, who, though they have never dreamed of political independence,
or even of local autonomy, have most reason to complain of the existing
order of things. At all times they have furnished a goodly contingent to the
revolutionary movement, and many of them have belied their traditional
reputation of timidity and cowardice by taking part in very dangerous
terrorist enterprises—in some cases ending their career on the scaffold. In
1897 they created a Social-Democratic organisation of their own,
commonly known as the Bund, which joined, in 1898, the Russian Social-
Democratic Labour Party, on the understanding that it should retain its
independence on all matters affecting exclusively the Jewish population.* It
now possesses a very ably-conducted weekly organ, and of all sections of
the Social-Democratic group it is unquestionably the best organised. This is
not surprising, because the Jews have more business capacity than the
Russians, and centuries of oppression have developed in the race a
wonderful talent for secret illegal activity, and for eluding the vigilance of
the police.

* The official title of this Bund is the "Universal Jewish
Labour Union in Russia and Poland." Its organ is called
Sovremenniya Izvestiya (Contemporary News).

It would be very interesting to know the numerical strength of these
groups, but we have no materials for forming even an approximate estimate.
The Liberals are certainly the most numerous. They include the great
majority of the educated classes, but they are less persistently energetic than
their rivals, and their methods of action make less impression on the
Government. The two Socialist groups, though communicative enough with
regard to their doctrines and aims, are very reticent with regard to the
number of their adherents, and this naturally awakens a suspicion that an
authoritative statement on the subject would tend to diminish rather than
enhance their importance in the eyes of the public. If statistics of the Social
Democrats could be obtained, it would be necessary to distinguish between
the three categories of which the group is composed: (1) The educated
active members, who form the directing, controlling element; (2) the fully
indoctrinated recruits from the working classes; and (3) workmen who
desire merely to better their material condition, but who take part in
political demonstrations in the hope of bringing pressure to bear on their
employers, and inducing the Government to intervene on their behalf.

Page 709

The two Socialist groups are not only increasing the number of their
adherents; they are also extending and improving their organisation, as is
proved by the recent strikes, which are the work of the Social Democrats,
and by the increasing rural disturbances and acts of terrorism, which are the
work of the Socialist-Revolutionaries.
With regard to the unorganised Nationalist group, all I can do towards
conveying a vague, general idea of its numerical strength is to give the
numbers of the populations—men, women, and children—of which the
Nationalist agitators are the self-constituted representatives, without
attempting to estimate the percentage of the actively disaffected. The
populations in question are:

Poles 7,900,000
Jews 5,190,000
Finlanders 2,592,000
Armenians 1,200,000
Georgians 408,000
————— 16,495,000

If a National Assembly were created, in which all the nationalities were
represented according to the numbers of the population, the Poles, roughly
speaking, would have 38 members, the Jews 24, the Finlanders 12, the
Armenians 6, and the Georgians 2: whereas the Russians would have about
400. The other subject-nationalities in which symptoms of revolutionary
fermentation have appeared are too insignificant to require special mention.
As the representatives of the various subject-nationalities are
endeavouring to combine, so likewise are the Liberals and the two Socialist
groups trying to form a coalition, and for this purpose they have already
held several conferences. How far they will succeed it is impossible to say.
On one point—the necessity of limiting or abolishing the Autocratic Power
—they are unanimous, and there seems to be a tacit understanding that for
the present they shall work together amicably on parallel lines, each group
reserving its freedom of action for the future, and using meanwhile its own
customary means of putting pressure on the Government. We may expect,
therefore, that for a time the Liberals will go on holding conferences and
congresses in defiance of the police authorities, delivering eloquent
speeches, discussing thorny political questions, drafting elaborate
constitutions, and making gentle efforts to clog the wheels of the
Administration,* while the Social Democrats will continue to organise

Page 710

strikes and semi-pacific demonstrations,** and the Socialist-
Revolutionaries will seek to accelerate the march of events by agrarian
disturbances and acts of terrorism.

* As an illustration of this I may cite the fact that
several Zemstvos have declared themselves unable, under
present conditions, to support the indigent families of
soldiers at the front.

** I call them semi-pacific, because on such occasions the
demonstrators are instructed to refrain from violence only
so long as the police do not attempt to stop the proceedings
by force.

It is certain, however, that the parting of the ways will be reached sooner
or later, and already there are indications that it is not very far off. Liberals
and Social Democrats may perhaps work together for a considerable time,
because the latter, though publicly committed to socialistic schemes which
the Liberals must regard with the strongest antipathy, are willing to accept a
Constitutional regime during the period of transition. It is difficult,
however, to imagine that the Liberals, of whom a large proportion are
landed proprietors, can long go hand in hand with the Socialist-
Revolutionaries, who propose to bring about the revolution by inciting the
peasants to seize unceremoniously the estates, live stock, and agricultural
implements of the landlords.
Already the Socialist-Revolutionaries have begun to speak publicly of the
inevitable rupture in terms by no means flattering to their temporary allies.
In a brochure recently issued by their central committee the following
passage occurs:
"If we consider the matter seriously and attentively, it becomes evident
that all the strength of the bourgeoisie lies in its greater or less capacity for
frightening and intimidating the Government by the fear of a popular rising;
but as the bourgeoisie itself stands in mortal terror of the thing with which it
frightens the Government, its position at the moment of insurrection will be
rather ridiculous and pitiable."
To understand the significance of this passage, the reader must know that,
in the language of the Socialists, bourgeoisie and Liberals are convertible
terms.
The truth is that the Liberals find themselves in an awkward strategical
position. As quiet, respectable members of society they dislike violence of

Page 711

every kind, and occasionally in moments of excitement they believe that
they may attain their ends by mere moral pressure, but when they find that
academic protests and pacific demonstrations make no perceptible
impression on the Government, they become impatient and feel tempted to
approve, at least tacitly, of stronger measures. Many of them do not profess
to regard with horror and indignation the acts of the terrorists, and some of
them, if I am correctly informed, go so far as to subscribe to the funds of
the Socialist-Revolutionaries without taking very stringent precautions
against the danger of the money being employed for the preparation of
dynamite and hand grenades.
This extraordinary conduct on the part of moderate Liberals may well
surprise Englishmen, but it is easily explained. The Russians have a strong
vein of recklessness in their character, and many of them are at present
imbued with an unquestioning faith in the miracle-working power of
Constitutionalism. These seem to imagine that as soon as the Autocratic
Power is limited by parliamentary institutions the discontented will cease
from troubling and the country will be at rest.
It is hardly necessary to say that such expectations are not likely to be
realised. All sections of the educated classes may be agreed in desiring
"liberty," but the word has many meanings, and nowhere more than in
Russia at the present day. For the Liberals it means simply democratic
parliamentary government; for the Social Democrat it means the undisputed
predominance of the Proletariat; for the Socialist-Revolutionary it means
the opportunity of realising immediately the Socialist ideal; for the
representative of a subject-nationality it means the abolition of racial and
religious disabilities and the attainment of local autonomy or political
independence. There is no doubt, therefore, that in Russia, as in other
countries, a parliament would develop political parties bitterly hostile to
each other, and its early history might contain some startling surprises for
those who had helped to create it. If the Constitution, for example, were
made as democratic as the Liberals and Socialists demand, the elections
might possibly result in an overwhelming Conservative majority ready to
re-establish the Autocratic Power! This is not at all so absurd as it sounds,
for the peasants, apart from the land question, are thoroughly Conservative.
The ordinary muzhik can hardly conceive that the Emperor's power can be
limited by a law or an Assembly, and if the idea were suggested to him, he
would certainly not approve. In his opinion the Tsar should be omnipotent.

Page 712

If everything is not satisfactory in Russia, it is because the Tsar does not
know of the evil, or is prevented from curing it by the tchinovniks and the
landed proprietors. "More power, therefore, to his elbow!" as an Irishman
might say. Such is the simple political creed of the "undeveloped" muzhik,
and all the efforts of the revolutionary groups to develop him have not yet
been attended with much success.
How, then, the reader may ask, is an issue to be found out of the present
imbroglio? I cannot pretend to speak with authority, but it seems to me that
there are only two methods of dealing with the situation: prompt, energetic
repression, or timely, judicious concessions to popular feeling. Either of
these methods might, perhaps, have been successful, but the Government
adopted neither, and has halted between the two. By this policy of drift it
has encouraged the hopes of all, has satisfied nobody, and has diminished
its own prestige.
In defence or extenuation of this attitude it may be said that there is
considerable danger in the adoption of either course. Vigorous repression
means staking all on a single card, and if it were successful it could not do
more than postpone the evil day, because the present antiquated form of
government—suitable enough, perhaps, for a simply organised peasant-
empire vegetating in an atmosphere of "eternal stillness"—cannot
permanently resist the rising tide of modern ideas and aspirations, and is
incapable of grappling successfully with the complicated problems of
economic and social progress which are already awaiting solution. Sooner
or later the bureaucratic machine, driven solely by the Autocratic Power in
the teeth of popular apathy or opposition, must inevitably break down, and
the longer the collapse is postponed the more violent is it likely to be. On
the other hand, it is impossible to foresee the effects of concessions. Mere
bureaucratic reforms will satisfy no one; they are indeed not wanted except
as a result of more radical changes. What all sections of the Opposition
demand is that the people should at least take part in the government of the
country by means of freely elected representatives in Parliament assembled.
It is useless to argue with them that Constitutionalism will certainly not
work the miracles that are expected of it, and that in the struggles of
political parties which it is sure to produce the unity and integrity of the
Empire may be endangered. Lessons of that kind can only be learned by
experience. Other countries, it is said, have existed and thriven under free
political institutions, and why not Russia? Why should she be a pariah

Page 713

among the nations? She gave parliamentary institutions to the young
nationalities of the Balkan Peninsula as soon as they were liberated from
Turkish bondage, and she has not yet been allowed such privileges herself!
Let us suppose now that the Autocratic Power has come to feel the
impossibility of remaining isolated as it is at present, and that it has decided
to seek solid support in some section of the population, what section should
it choose? Practically it has no choice. The only way of relieving the
pressure is to make concessions to the Constitutionalists. That course would
conciliate, not merely the section of the Opposition which calls itself by that
name and represents the majority of the educated classes, but also, in a
lesser degree, all the other sections. No doubt these latter would accept the
concession only as part payment of their demands and a means of attaining
ulterior aims. Again and again the Social Democrats have proclaimed
publicly that they desire parliamentary government, not as an end in itself,
but as a stepping stone towards the realisation of the Socialist ideal. It is
evident, however, that they would have to remain on this stepping stone for
a long series of years—until the representatives of the Proletariat obtained
an overwhelming majority in the Chamber. In like manner the subject-
nationalities would regard a parliamentary regime as a mere temporary
expedient—a means of attaining greater local and national autonomy—and
they would probably show themselves more impatient than the Social
Democrats. Any inordinate claims, however, which they might put forward
would encounter resistance, as the Poles found in 1863, not merely from the
Autocratic Power, but from the great majority of the Russian people, who
have no sympathy with any efforts tending to bring about the disruption of
the Empire. In short, as soon as the Assembly set to work, the delegates
would be sobered by a consciousness of responsibility, differences of
opinion and aims would inevitably appear, and the various groups
transformed into political parties, instead of all endeavouring as at present
to pull down the Autocratic Power, would expend a great part of their
energy in pulling against each other.
In order to reach this haven of safety it is necessary to pass through a
period of transition, in which there are some formidable difficulties. One of
these I may mention by way of illustration.
In creating parliamentary institutions of any kind the Government could
hardly leave intact the present system of allowing the police to arrest

Page 714

without a proper warrant, and send into exile without trial, any one
suspected of revolutionary designs. On this point all the Opposition groups
are agreed, and all consequently put forward prominently the demand for
the inviolability of person and domicile. To grant such a concession seems a
very simple and easy matter, but any responsible minister might hesitate to
accept such a restriction of his authority. We know, he would argue, that the
terrorist section of the Socialist-Revolutionary group, the so-called Militant
Organisation, are very busy preparing bombs, and the police, even with the
extensive, ill-defined powers which they at present possess, have the
greatest difficulty in preventing the use of such objectionable instruments of
political warfare. Would not the dynamiters and throwers of hand-grenades
utilise a relaxation of police supervision, as they did in the time of Louis
Melikof,* for carrying out their nefarious designs?

* Vide supra, p. 569.

I have no desire to conceal or minimise such dangers, but I believe they
are temporary and by no means so great as the dangers of the only other
alternatives—energetic repression and listless inactivity. Terrorism and
similar objectionable methods of political warfare are symptoms of an
abnormal, unhealthy state of society, and would doubtless disappear in
Russia, as they have disappeared in other countries, with the conditions
which produced them. If the terrorists continued to exist under a more
liberal regime, they would be much less formidable, because they would
lose the half-concealed sympathy which they at present enjoy.
Political assassinations may occasionally take place under the most
democratic governments, as the history of the United States proves, but
terrorism as a system is to be found only in countries where the political
power is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals; and it sometimes
happens that irresponsible persons are exposed to terrorist attacks. We have
an instance of this at present in St. Petersburg. The reluctance of the
Emperor to adopt at once a Liberal programme is commonly attributed to
the influence of two members of the Imperial family, the Empress Dowager
and the Grand Duke Vladimir. This is a mistake. Neither of these
personages is so reactionary as is generally supposed, and their political
views, whatever they may be, have no appreciable influence on the course
of affairs. If the Empress Dowager had possessed the influence so often
ascribed to her, M. Plehve would not have remained so long in power. As

Page 715

for the Grand Duke Vladimir, he is not in favour, and for nearly two years
he has never been consulted on political matters. The so-called Grand Ducal
party of which he is supposed to be the leader, is a recently invented fiction.
When in difficulties the Emperor may consult individually some of his near
relatives, but there is no coherent group to which the term party could
properly be applied.
As soon as the Autocratic Power has decided on a definite line of action,
it is to be hoped that a strong man will be found to take the direction of
affairs. In Russia, as in other autocratically governed countries, strong men
in the political sense of the term are extremely rare, and when they do
appear as a lusus naturae they generally take their colour from their
surroundings, and are of the authoritative, dictatorial type. During recent
years only two strong men have come to the front in the Russian official
world. The one was M. Plehve, who was nothing if not authoritative and
dictatorial, and who is no longer available for experiments in repression or
constitutionalism. The other is M. Witte. As an administrator under an
autocratic regime he has displayed immense ability and energy, but it does
not follow that he is a statesman capable of piloting the ship into calm
waters, and he is not likely to have an opportunity of making the attempt,
for he does not—to state the case mildly—possess the full confidence of his
august master.
Even if a strong man, enjoying fully the Imperial confidence, could be
found, the problem would not be thereby completely and satisfactorily
solved, because an autocrat, who is the Lord's Anointed, cannot delegate his
authority to a simple mortal without losing something of the semi-religious
halo and the prestige on which his authority rests. While a roi faineant may
fulfil effectively all the essential duties of sovereignty, an autocrate faineant
is an absurdity.
In these circumstances, it is idle to speculate as to the future. All we can
do is to await patiently the development of events, and in all probability it is
the unexpected that will happen.
The reader doubtless feels that I am offering a very lame and impotent
conclusion, and I must confess that I am conscious of this feeling myself,
but I think I may fairly plead extenuating circumstances. Happily for my
peace of mind I am a mere observer who is not called upon to invent a
means of extricating Russia from her difficult position. For that arduous

Page 716

task there are already brave volunteers enough in the field. All I have to do
is to explain as clearly as I can the complicated problem to be solved. Nor
do I feel it any part of my duty to make predictions. I believe I am pretty
well acquainted with the situation at the present moment, but what it may
be a few weeks hence, when the words I am now writing issue from the
press, I do not profess to foresee.

Page 717

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