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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77805 ***
+
+
+
+
+                                  THE
+                         MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA
+
+
+                                   BY
+                             MAURICE BARING
+
+
+                         THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
+
+     LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN, LEEDS PARIS, LEIPZIG, AND NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+                              DEDICATION.
+                            TO H. G. WELLS.
+
+
+MY DEAR H. G.,
+
+I dedicate this book to you in the hope that you will read it; for if
+you do, I shall feel certain of having at least one reader who will
+understand exactly what I have tried to say, however inadequate the
+expression may have been, and who, at any rate, will not misunderstand
+me.
+
+Not long ago I was looking on at a play in London. The audience was, on
+the whole, of that kind which the Americans call “high-browed,” with a
+certain sprinkling of the semi-intelligent and the wholly elegant.
+Behind me were sitting a young man and a young lady, who were discussing
+intellectual topics suited to the rarer atmosphere of that interesting
+theatre. Among other subjects, they talked about Mr. Stephen Grahame’s
+books and articles on Russia. I do not know if you have read his books;
+if not, I advise you to do so. But you probably know that they deal with
+the Russian people; that Mr. Grahame walked on foot from Moscow to
+Archangel; and travelled, as a pilgrim, with Russian pilgrims to
+Jerusalem. It is therefore obvious that he came into close contact with
+the Russian people, and that his knowledge was at first hand and derived
+from direct experience.
+
+Well, would you believe it, the highly educated young gentleman who was
+sitting behind me, who had read Mr. Grahame’s books and articles, said—I
+could hardly believe my ears, but he said it—that the trouble about Mr.
+Grahame was his blind faith in _the Russian Bureaucracy_. I confess,
+when these words caught my ear, I thought to myself what is the use of
+writing books if intelligent people in reading them derive an impression
+which is the exact opposite of that which you think you have expressed
+with some clearness?
+
+The young man in question went on to say that such was Mr. Grahame’s
+fierce faith in political reaction that he dared to compare a
+half-starved Russian peasant with a free American citizen, and here
+again he revealed fresh vistas of misapprehension.
+
+I have often had similar experiences myself since I began to write about
+Russian things. I have at various times been accused of being a
+revolutionary, a conservative, a liberal, a fanatical reactionary. But
+these accusations have left me indifferent, since, as they contradict
+themselves, they cancel out into nothingness.
+
+As far as the subject of Russia is concerned, I have always, and only,
+had one object in view: to stimulate in others an interest which I have
+myself experienced. I know—I cannot explain why it is—but I know that
+between the Russian and the English peoples there are curious
+possibilities of sympathy, curious analogies, and still more curious
+differences which complement one another. I know the Russians and the
+English do get on well when they meet and get to know each other. I know
+the sympathy I myself have felt, and do feel, for the Russians is a
+sympathy which would, can, and could be felt by many of my countrymen.
+This has been my whole and sole object in writing about Russia. I am
+engaged on one more very short book on Russian literature, and then I
+shall drop the subject for ever. I have said my say. I leave it to the
+newer and better writers to say theirs.
+
+But in the meantime, in regard to this book, I repeat I wish to secure
+at least one reader who will understand and who will not misunderstand.
+That is why I dedicate this book to you. At the same time I hope, even
+if you do not read it, that it will remind you of the strenuous days and
+the Attic nights which we spent together in St. Petersburg.
+
+                                                         Yours ever,
+                                                         MAURICE BARING.
+
+     ST. PETERSBURG,
+ _February 22-March 7, 1914_.
+
+
+
+
+                                PREFACE.
+
+
+I have endeavoured in this book to provide some kind of answer to the
+questions which I found by experience are generally put by the traveller
+who comes to Russia for the first time, and whose curiosity is
+stimulated with regard to the way in which the people live and to the
+manner of their government.
+
+I have endeavoured to convey to the reader a single idea of the nature
+of the more important factors in Russian life. I am only too well aware
+that what I have to supply in the way of explanation and elucidation is
+inadequate, incomplete, and superficial. My excuse is that the questions
+of the average inquirer are, as a rule, neither profound nor
+comprehensive; and that profound or comprehensive replies, were I
+capable of giving them—which I am not—would be received neither with
+attention nor interest. They would be like arrows shot into empty space.
+For the average inquirer has neither time nor inclination for exhaustive
+inquiry or minute research. He wishes to be told what he wishes to know
+in a manner he can understand, and as briefly as possible. But my hope
+is that I may stimulate the interest of the reader in the subject, and
+in a manner which may lead him to seek for more exhaustive information
+at the fountainhead, or at richer sources than mine. This is every day
+becoming easier.
+
+Some years ago books on Russia which had any serious value or
+substantial interest were few and far between. Lately the interest in
+Russian affairs has been stimulated by many causes: by the coming of
+Russian artists, singers, and dancers to England; by the appearance in
+the press of valuable articles written by Russian authors; by the
+publication of adequate translations from Russian authors (Mrs.
+Garnett’s translations of Dostoievsky, for instance); and by several
+excellent books written by English authors on Russia, such as the books
+of Mr. Stephen Grahame dealing with the Russian people, the admirable
+and encyclopædic work of Mr. Harold Williams, and, in a somewhat lighter
+vein, Mr. Reynold’s “My Russian Year.” All these books reveal a
+standpoint, a mastery of the subject, that are far removed from the
+fantastic, false, and melodramatic concoctions that were abundant some
+years ago.
+
+In calling this book the “Mainsprings” of Russia, I am conscious of
+having omitted several of the most important mainsprings of Russian
+life: chief among them its commerce and industry. The subject is so
+large that, had I dealt with it at all, there would have been no room
+for anything else in a book of this size. Also, as far as the actual
+facts are concerned they are to be found clearly stated in Dr. Kennard’s
+excellent “Russian Year Book.”
+
+Nor have I attempted to deal with the Army and the Navy, which I
+consider to be factors which are likely to be dealt with by experts,
+since they cannot afford to be altogether neglected by foreigners. There
+is another subject I have omitted—it is not, it is true, a mainspring of
+Russian life; but it is a sore spot and a question of burning vital
+interest—I mean the Jewish question.
+
+In a book as short as this it would be impossible to devote sufficient
+space to the matter without crowding out other things which concern the
+greater majority; but it is most desirable that competent observers
+should deal with the Jewish question in Russia, which at present, as far
+as the rest of Europe is concerned, is almost entirely handled either by
+bitter Anti-Semites, or by those who are the actors in the drama itself.
+And there is no question in Modern Russia which is fraught with more
+far-reaching effects, and probably none which is at present more
+difficult of solution.
+
+My thanks are due to A. J. Halpern of the Russian Bar for his valuable
+help in regard to the chapter on “Justice,” to Mr. Dimitriev-Mamonov,
+and to many other Russian friends for their criticism and advice.
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS.
+
+
+                     I. RETROSPECT                 13
+                    II. THE RUSSIAN PEASANT        31
+                   III. THE NOBILITY               72
+                    IV. THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE     97
+                     V. CAUSES OF DISCONTENT      129
+                    VI. THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN       155
+                   VII. THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS   183
+                  VIII. THE RUSSIAN CHURCH        216
+                    IX. EDUCATION                 246
+                     X. JUSTICE                   269
+                    XI. THE FASCINATION OF RUSSIA 299
+
+
+
+
+                           THE MAINSPRINGS OF
+                                RUSSIA.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER I.
+                              RETROSPECT.
+
+
+I should like to set the reader’s mind at rest at once. I am not going
+to ask him to read a historical treatise on the origins of the Russian
+people, nor am I going to lead him into the obscure pathways and dim
+shadows of the remote past.
+
+Firstly, even if I wished to do so, I have not the necessary erudition,
+nor the requisite powers of learned exposition. Secondly, the origin of
+the Russian people is a debatable question; the theories with regard to
+it are constantly changing, and vary with the fickle fashion of the day;
+the orthodox views of forty, of thirty, of twenty years ago are now said
+to be old-fashioned; and the orthodox views of to-day will probably be
+considered old-fashioned before very long. The reason being that all
+such views are highly conjectural, and that very little is known about
+the shifting tides, eddies, and currents in the immeasurably far-off
+floods of races and tribes out of which the Russian people emerged.
+
+Thirdly, whenever I open a book that begins with a historical
+retrospect, I feel that it is the reader’s duty to skip that chapter.
+
+Why, then, write anything of the kind? The answer is that I am writing
+on the assumption that the reader is an average reader, and that if he
+has bought or borrowed a book about Russia, he will be sufficiently
+interested in the subject to be able to stand a few simple facts to
+begin with, even if they are historical. I also assume that, if he has
+bought or borrowed this book, and has not gone to a public library to
+get a more learned book, he is not a specialist—that is to say, he knows
+as much or as little as the average Englishman knows about Russia who
+has received an average English education, who reads _The Times_, and
+takes a moderate but intelligent interest in international politics and
+foreign countries, and who has perhaps read one or two standard books on
+Russia, and not only _My Official Wife_ by Savage, _Michael Strogoff_ by
+Jules Verne, and all that picturesque tribe of books called either Red
+Russia, Scarlet Russia, Crimson Russia, Free Russia, the Real Russia,
+Russia as she is, or Russia as she isn’t.
+
+There is also another class of reader who may take up the book, also an
+average reader, with an average education, but whose knowledge of Russia
+is of a different and wider kind—the reader of translations of Russian
+novels, the devotee of Tolstoy and Turgeniev and Gorky; the man or
+woman—it is generally a woman—who has seen translations of Chekhov’s
+plays at the Stage Society, and who is a fervent admirer of the Russian
+ballet. He or she is interested in Russia, but has never been there; and
+although familiar with Russian novels and plays, he or she is more
+inclined to form an opinion of the Russian people on data derived from
+English novels on Russian life than from Russian novels on Russian life.
+
+I have often come across cases of this kind—I mean people who do not
+appear to realize that the intensely realistic Russian fiction that they
+so much admire probably has some basis and counterpart in real life, and
+who, in spite of this documentary evidence with regard to Russian life,
+with which they are familiar, still continue to form a picture of
+Russian life based on English fiction such as is written by English
+journalists and novelists.
+
+Such readers, my experience is, if they come across certain historical
+facts about Russia in the past or the present, meet them with a shock of
+surprise and often with a smile of incredulity.
+
+It is for the benefit of the average reader of every kind that I want to
+try and make a few, a very few, historical facts clear, which I think
+throw light on any attempt to deal with any aspects of Russian life. If
+the reader knows them too well already, he will forgive me and skip,
+proud of his superior knowledge; if he disbelieves them, he can dispute
+them, and prove me wrong.
+
+My first fact is geographical. It is that Russia is a flat country,
+without an indented seacoast, and without sharp mountain ranges. It is
+not only flat but uniform. Owing to this, the expansion of the Russian
+people took place on land. The Russians were, and are, constantly
+emigrating, at first from south to north, and afterwards from west to
+east. Russia is therefore a country of colonists.
+
+I remember once saying this to a man to whom the statement evidently
+came as a shock of surprise, because he replied, “Really, I thought
+Russia was an autocracy.”
+
+Now, who are these colonists? Who are the Russians, in fact? I wonder if
+one set this question to all the schoolboys and undergraduates, what the
+most prevalent answer would be. I believe it would be something like
+this: that the Russian was a man got up like a European except in
+winter, but that if you scratched him you would find a Tartar, and that
+a Tartar was a man with a yellow skin and a snub nose. I think you might
+also often get the answer that Russians were Slavs; but that if you
+asked what a Slav is, you would be told he was a kind of Tartar.
+
+In Russia at the present day you will find representatives of every kind
+of race and every kind of creed—Buriats who worship Buddha, and
+disciples of the late Lord Radstock—and every kind of language; but out
+of all these, three dominant races played a part in Russian history—the
+Finns, the Tartars, and the Slavs. The Slavs got the best of it. They
+absorbed the Finns and ousted the Tartars.
+
+So we remain face to face with the question, What are the Slavs? As to
+how, why, whence, and when the Slavs came to Russia hundreds of books
+have been written, and the solution of the problem is, I believe, like
+that of many historical questions, a matter of fashion.
+
+One solid fact, however, rises before our grateful comprehension. The
+Slavs are a white people like the Latins, the Celts, and the Germans;
+they have nothing in common with anything Tartar, Mongol, or Semitic;
+and there are traces of them having been in Southern Europe on the banks
+of the Vistula and of the Dnieper from time immemorial.
+
+Having got to Russia a long time ago, they overran the country and
+absorbed it.
+
+They began in the south, the capital being Kiev, and in the eleventh
+century Russia was a part of the political system of Europe.
+
+Russia, in the days before William the Conqueror—in the days of Harold,
+who was related to one of the rulers of Kiev, Yaroslav—was not more
+backward than France or England were at that time, and would probably
+have developed in the same manner as the other European countries had it
+not been for an unfortunate interruption in the shape of a Mongol or
+Tartar invasion.
+
+From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century Russia was under the
+dominion of the Mongols.
+
+The Slavs, as they gradually expanded and absorbed Russia, fell into two
+natural divisions: the Great Russians and the Little Russians, which
+correspond to the north and the south. When the Mongol invasion came
+about, the Little Russians were cut off from the Great Russians.
+
+The Great Russians continued to expand northward, southward, and
+eastward. They were engaged in a perpetual struggle against the East.
+They acted as a buffer for Europe against the East; and in the sixteenth
+century they finally got rid of the Eastern yoke altogether and drove
+them out of the country.
+
+This is the big fact I have been leading up to: Russia saved Western
+Europe from being overrun by hordes of barbarians.
+
+“There is,” writes the late Mr. Stead, in the introduction to the
+translation of Labaume’s narrative of Napoleon’s campaign, “a strange
+and pestilent habit among some Englishmen of ignoring all the great
+services which Russia has rendered to the cause of human progress and
+the liberty of nations.”
+
+That Russia acted as a buffer against the barbarian invasion from the
+East is the first and not the least of these services.
+
+In the sixteenth century the Great Russia was a kingdom centralized in
+Moscow, chiefly engaged in fighting her neighbours, the most powerful of
+which was Poland, and one of the most energetic and singular of her
+rulers, Ivan the Terrible, began to negotiate with the West. Ivan, in
+fact, wished to marry Queen Elizabeth; but Western Europe was not
+vitally affected by Russia until the appearance on the stage of the
+world of that extraordinary monarch, and still more extraordinary man,
+called Peter the Great.
+
+Peter the Great not only conceived and executed the idea of opening in
+Russia a window on to the West, but he restored to Russia her place
+among European nations—the place she had occupied in the eleventh
+century, and which she had lost owing to the Mongol invasion.
+
+It was no abnormal or unnatural mission that Peter the Great set out to
+accomplish, otherwise his work would have died with him. He carried
+Russia along the natural road of her career. Only, being a man of
+abnormal genius, he gave to Russia a violent electric shock; he
+accelerated to an extent, which seems little short of miraculous, the
+natural progress of the country. He accomplished in a few years the work
+of many generations. “Pierre I^{er},” says Montesquieu, “donnait les
+mœurs et les manières de l’Europe à une nation de l’Europe.” He shifted
+the capital of the country, built St. Petersburg on a swamp, created an
+army, a fleet, enrolled quantities of foreigners into the service of
+Russia. He sketched the outlines of a gigantic plan, which still remains
+to be filled in to this day. The violence and fury with which he
+compelled a reluctant people to adopt his changes had, of course, its
+drawbacks. A nation has to pay for a man of genius, even when he is
+working on the right lines, for what is for the good of his country, and
+for what is, in the long run, in accordance with its national spirit.
+
+Peter the Great was successful, but the methods which he had to employ
+in order to bring about his swift and gigantic changes were not without
+regrettable results, which are still visible in the machinery of Russian
+administration and in the nature of many Russian institutions. He found
+Russia a sleepy kingdom encrusted with Oriental habit and Byzantine
+tradition; he hacked off that crust with an axe, and he left Russia open
+to the influences of Europe, and ready to value the place which was her
+due amongst the nations of Europe.
+
+His work was carried on by Catherine II. on the same lines, and further.
+She opened educated Russia to European ideas; she civilized Russia
+intellectually; and Russia, under her guidance, took a leading part in
+the European Concert.
+
+But it was later that Russia was destined to play a part which vitally
+affected every nation of Western Europe. This was in 1812. In 1812
+Russia broke up the power of Napoleon.
+
+“Leipzig and Waterloo were but the corollaries,” writes Mr. Stead, “of a
+solved problem.”
+
+“It is an incontestable fact,” writes M. Rambaud, the French historian
+of Russia, “that of all the allies, Russia showed herself the least
+grasping. It was she who had given the signal for the struggle against
+Napoleon, and had shown most perseverance in pursuit of the common end.
+Without her example the states of Europe would never have dreamed of
+arming against him. Her skilful leniency towards France finished the
+work begun by the war.”
+
+So far, all these facts I have mentioned concern the relations of Russia
+to Europe; they necessarily reacted on the internal conditions of the
+country.
+
+The fact that Russia was playing an important part abroad meant that the
+means by which this part could be played had to be furnished at home,
+and the finding of such means affected the administration of the country
+and the whole of its population.
+
+In order that Russia should be able to play a part in Europe, the first
+thing that was necessary was an army.
+
+Peter the Great made an army (and a fleet). How did he do it? Where did
+the officers and men come from?
+
+When Peter the Great came to the throne, the organization of the State
+was patriarchal. There was practically no standing army except a kind of
+corps of janissaries, the _streltsy_ (which he destroyed). There were
+two classes: the nobility and the peasants. The nobility held the land
+and the peasants tilled it; but the nobility held the land on one
+condition only, and that was that they should render military service in
+their own person when it was necessary.
+
+The nobles were at the same time landowners and servants of the State,
+but they were landowners only on condition of being State servants.
+
+The peasants belonged to the land; they were attached to the land and
+could not be separated from it. This is what serfdom meant in Russia.
+Serfdom was not an immemorial institution in Russia. It was not a relic
+of paganism or barbarism; it was founded neither on conquest, nor on the
+habit of turning the captives made in inter-tribal wars into slaves, nor
+on a difference of race or colour; and unless this be understood, unless
+the true nature of this serfdom be realized, it is impossible to
+understand the part which the Russian peasantry play in the Russian
+nation.
+
+Briefly, serfdom came about thus. The peasants cultivated the land which
+the monarch conceded to the nobles as a salary or means of subsistence
+in return for military service. But up till about the end of the
+sixteenth century the peasants could choose and change their masters,
+and pass from one estate to another. They used, in fact, to exercise
+their right of transfer once a year, on St. George’s Day.
+
+At the end of the sixteenth century labour was precious and rare, and
+eagerly sought after by the nobles. The peasants were naturally inclined
+to emigrate, and the more adventurous were attracted towards the regions
+of the Don, the Kama, the Volga, and Siberia, and they thus avoided
+paying taxes. Moreover, the larger landed proprietors attracted the
+peasants to their estates to the detriment of the smaller landed
+proprietors. The primitive fiscal system of that day suffered from all
+this, and as a remedy to this state of things, in order to guarantee and
+regularize the financial and military supplies of the State, the peasant
+was attached to the soil. In 1593, in the reign of Feodor, the son of
+Ivan the Terrible, and owing to the initiative of Boris Godonnov, the
+right of transfer from one estate to another was first temporarily taken
+away from the peasant. The prohibition to transfer their service on this
+date was renewed by several sovereigns, and was finally crystallized in
+the law of the country. Once attached to the soil the peasant gradually
+lost his civil rights and became the chattel of the proprietor; thus
+what began by being a simple police measure ended by becoming organized
+slavery. Such was the state of things when Peter the Great came to the
+throne. The peasant was attached to the soil, the nobility were the
+army, for when an army was needed they had to fight themselves and to
+supply so many men into the bargain.
+
+Peter the Great wanted a standing army; and in order to get one, and at
+the same time to carry on the administration of the country, he created,
+or rather enlarged, the system of universal service. Every single
+Russian became a public servant. Henceforward it became obligatory for
+the noble to serve the State either in the military or the civil
+service—always, and not only in times of war. Moreover, in order to be
+an officer he had to pass an examination, and if he failed to pass it he
+had to serve as a private soldier. Further, in order to get enough
+soldiers, a system of conscription was introduced; that is to say, in
+every place, out of so many thousand men, so many were taken.
+
+Again, the nobility ceased to be a closed caste depending on hereditary
+titles; it became a class of State servants, and was thrown open to all.
+Rank depended on service. Instead of obtaining a post because you were a
+noble, you became a noble for having attained by service to such and
+such a post. Rank in service became the only rank. Thus Peter the Great,
+in order to create a standing army, created a standing civil service; he
+destroyed the principle of hereditary aristocracy; and both branches of
+the universal service he created, military and civil, were divided into
+its fourteen grades or _tchins_, hence the word _tchinnovnik_, the
+ordinary Russian word for official. Again, as he was constantly going to
+war, and constantly needed men, and the nobility had to supply so many
+men from their land, he tightened the bonds which attached the peasants
+to the soil. He strengthened the system of serfdom; and the rulers who
+succeeded him carried on the same policy, because the revenue depended
+on the State being administered by the landed gentry, which gradually
+ceased to be an aristocratic caste, and kept on increasing in size,
+until towards the end of the reign of Catherine II., when it had grown
+to be a vast bureaucracy.
+
+It is clear that, if the great majority of the landed proprietors were
+engaged in administrating the country, they would have less and less
+time to look after their estates after the old patriarchal fashion; and
+it is also clear that as civilization progressed everything in the
+machinery of the State necessarily increased in size. Men were needed to
+deal with the more complicated machinery; with the administration of
+finances, of justice, and of the police. The men who filled all the new
+posts created by the ever increasing complication of the administration
+of the State were the former landed proprietors, the actual officials.
+The consequence was they ceased to be able to look after their land.
+This being so, there was no defence left against the growing moral
+sentiment which had risen against serfdom, namely: the moral principle
+that it was wrong that peasants should be in the position of cattle and
+chattels. This sentiment was expressed more than once by the peasants
+themselves in mutinies. It was expressed from the outside by all that
+was enlightened in the country.
+
+The Emperor Alexander I. took the first steps towards the great reform
+by liberating the serfs in the Baltic provinces. It is said that his
+brother, the Emperor Nicholas, on his deathbed left the execution of the
+reform as a solemn legacy to his son and successor, Alexander II. The
+Crimean War was the actual shock which brought the reform about.
+Literature was a powerful factor in pressing it on. Writers of genius,
+such as Gogol and Turgeniev, by their descriptions; publicists, such as
+Samarin and Herzen, by their pleading, played a large part in
+accelerating its advent. They gave expression to what was the universal
+and imperative opinion of thinking Russia, so that the reform when it
+came about, and when the serfs were liberated in 1861, was the work of
+the nation as well as of the Emperor.
+
+This retrospect has brought us to the year 1861. Since then many
+momentous things have happened to Russia. A war; the inauguration of a
+system of local self-government; another war; and if not a revolution, a
+revolutionary movement, a long and vital crisis, out of which rose the
+beginnings of popular representation. But these events, in so far as
+they deal with Russian life as it is to-day, will be dealt with in the
+subsequent chapters.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II.
+                          THE RUSSIAN PEASANT.
+
+
+The Russian peasant is the most important factor in Russian life. He
+constitutes the majority of the nation. The peasant not only tills the
+arable land, but he owns the greater part of it. This is a fact which is
+practically unknown in England. There was once an anarchist Russian who
+gave a lecture to the poor in the East End of London on the wrongs of
+the Russian people. In the course of the lecture he declared with
+fervent indignation that no peasant in Russia could own more than so
+many acres of land. Upon which the audience cried “Shame!” The irony of
+this is piercing when one reflects that not one member of that audience
+had ever owned, or could ever in his wildest dreams look forward to
+owning, a particle of arable soil.
+
+The average reader, who has some vague notions of Russia, probably
+thinks of the Russian peasant as a serf, and as such a scarcely
+civilized savage—a little better than a beast. It has already been
+mentioned in the preceding chapter that serfdom in Russia was not a
+slavery resulting from conquest or difference in race and colour, but
+the outcome of economic conditions. Serfdom was a measure by which the
+peasant, who had a tendency to wander, was made fast to the land,
+because if he wandered the State was threatened with economic ruin;
+moral slavery, and the ownership of the peasant by the landowner, were
+the ultimate results of this economic measure. When the legislation
+which ultimately produced serfdom was framed, it was not regarded by
+those who framed it as a permanent solution of the relations between
+landowner and peasant, but only as a temporary makeshift. The
+result—namely, slavery—was unforeseen.
+
+Now, the peasants never, through nearly two centuries of slavery, lost
+sight of the fact that this legislation was only a temporary makeshift,
+a stroke of opportunism. Moreover, they kept fast hold of the idea that
+the land was theirs; that the land belonged to the people who tilled it;
+and that if for a time it was in the hands of landowners, that was
+because the emperor was obliged to lend it to the landowners, in order
+to pay them for such military service which the destinies of the
+fatherland rendered indispensable.
+
+In 1861 came the emancipation of the serfs, and this emancipation did
+not merely mean the end of the personal and moral slavery of the
+peasant, but something far more important also—namely, that a portion of
+the land which the peasant considered to be his by right was restored to
+him. The emancipation of the serfs was an act of State expropriation.
+More than 130,000,000 _desiatines_ of land (350,964,187 acres) passed
+from the hands of the landowners into the hands of the peasants for
+ever. On an average each peasant received from 8¼ to 11 acres; in the
+north he might receive more, in the south less. The nobility—that is to
+say, the landowners—were paid down by the Government for the land they
+had given up; the peasants had to pay back the State in instalments,
+over a period of more than fifty years. The State acted as banker to
+both parties, and not only paid the landowners ready money, but advanced
+the money to the peasants. The peasant had to pay back the money
+advanced to him at an interest of six per cent. over a period of
+forty-nine years, until the year 1910.
+
+In 1907 these payments were cancelled.
+
+The peasants, after the emancipation, were to continue to own the land
+in common, as they had always done before.
+
+In the days of serfdom every landowner possessed so much land, and the
+serfs—or, as they were called, “the souls”—who belonged to it. After the
+emancipation, each batch of serfs belonging to each separate owner
+became a separate and independent community, which owned land in common.
+The land which was thus owned in common could not be redistributed more
+than once every twelve years, and even then only if two-thirds of the
+village assembly voted for redistribution. A similar majority was
+necessary before any of the common land could become private property.
+
+All the land which was fit for cultivation was divided amongst the
+peasants, according to the number of taxed members in each household.
+But as the nature of the soil varied with its situation, and was richer
+in one place than another, or was more or less advantageous owing to
+other reasons—say its proximity or distance from the village—instead of
+receiving all his share of the land in one place, each taxed member in
+every household received so many strips of land in different places, so
+that the division might be fair.
+
+Supposing the land to be divided amongst Tom, Dick, and Harry was good
+in some parts, bad in another, and indifferent in a third, and each was
+to receive an acre: Tom would receive a third in the good part, a third
+in the bad part, and a third in the indifferent part, and Dick and Harry
+would fare likewise. When the land was redistributed, the share received
+by each household varied as that household increased or diminished in
+numbers.
+
+From 1861, the year of the emancipation, until 1904, the year of the
+Russo-Japanese War, the only change of importance in the peasant system
+of land tenure was made in the reign of Alexander III. A clause was
+introduced into the legislation on peasant land tenure which made it
+impossible for the peasant to buy himself out of the Commune. This
+clause was added in 1890. It was done because the Government at this
+period looked on the peasants as a safe conservative element, and
+considered that communal ownership of land fostered conservatism. During
+all this period agriculture had not improved, but had deteriorated. Half
+the landowners in Russia disappeared, and their place was taken by the
+peasants or by the merchants. The remaining landowners either let their
+land to the peasants, or tried (and for the most part failed) to farm it
+rationally.
+
+In 1904 came political unrest and universal political discontent. And
+amongst the peasants this discontent was expressed by one formula, and
+one formula alone—“Give us more land.” Agrarian riots took place all
+over Russia, and landowners’ houses were burnt and their cattle
+destroyed.
+
+Universal expropriation was brought forward as a political measure, but
+economically it was felt by those who had faced the question practically
+to be no remedy, except in regard to the land which was let by the
+landowners to the peasants.
+
+Nevertheless, something had to be done. All over Russia every landowner
+sold a certain amount of land to the peasants, and a great part of the
+land which had been hitherto let to the peasants, and not farmed by the
+landowner himself, became the peasants’ property. In 1905, roughly
+speaking, twenty-five per cent. of the amount of land still belonging to
+landowners passed into the hands of the peasants.
+
+In 1910 another great change came about. Owing to a law, drawn up at the
+initiative of P. A. Stolypin, the peasant obtained the right of leaving
+the Commune, and of converting his share of the land into his individual
+and permanent property. He could, moreover, exchange his separated
+strips of land for a corresponding amount of land which should be as far
+as possible all in one place. And if he wished to do this, and to start
+a farm, he could receive financial assistance from the State.
+
+On paper, nothing could be more satisfactory, the situation seeming to
+be this—that the peasant is able to leave the Commune if he wishes and
+become an independent peasant proprietor, but he is not compelled to do
+so. The idea was expressed at the time of the emancipation of the serfs
+by the men who drafted the law of reform, that it was desirable to leave
+the question of communal tenure to settle itself. And the same idea was
+reasserted by the Russian ministry, when the Bill on peasant land tenure
+was introduced into the Duma—namely, that it would be wrong either to
+bolster up the Commune artificially, or to destroy it, and that the
+right course was to leave the population itself free to settle in every
+individual case whether it wishes to remain in the Commune or not.
+
+Practically this is not what has happened. Practically, both owing to
+certain clauses in the law itself, and owing to the manner of its
+application, pressure has been put on the peasants to leave the Commune.
+The law works advantageously for those who leave the Commune,
+disadvantageously for those who wish to remain in the Commune. To
+explain how this happens would entail going into many technical points.
+To those who are interested in this subject, I would recommend an
+article in _The Russian Review_ of November 1912, by Alexander Manuilov,
+a member of the Russian Council of Empire.
+
+But if it is too lengthy a task to explain how this is so, it is easy in
+a few sentences to explain why this is so.
+
+The law on land tenure was made by the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy has
+always treated the peasant question from a political point of view. When
+the communal system seemed to lead to conservatism, the bureaucracy
+backed up the communal system (this was so, as I have already said, in
+the reign of Alexander III., and indeed made it impossible for the
+peasant to leave the Commune); when after 1904 the communal system
+seemed to encourage socialistic ideas, or to be made a basis for
+socialistic ideas, the bureaucracy backed up individual land tenure.
+Moreover, in the law itself and in the manner of its application the
+minority (those who wish to leave the Commune) are backed up at the
+expense of the majority, because by so doing the Government considered
+they were creating good sound conservative voters.
+
+In spite of this pressure, and perhaps because of it (although in some
+parts of Russia they have displayed eagerness to become the permanent
+owners of their respective strips of land), up till 1910, only four per
+cent. of the peasantry availed themselves of the right to exchange their
+strips for an allotment in one place; and up till January 1, 1912, the
+Communes who petitioned for deeds numbered only 4,656; and out of 45,994
+Communes, only 174,193 petitions were forthcoming, which shows a
+proportion of one in every three or four.
+
+It is, of course, too soon to generalize on the result of such recent
+legislation. Comparisons and analogies with similar legislation in other
+countries—such as Ireland, for instance—would be misleading, for the
+existence of the Commune is peculiar in Russia. At the present moment
+the Russian peasant owns land. He either owns strips in the land
+belonging to the Commune, shares which are liable to periodical
+redistribution, or else he has become the permanent owner of his strips,
+or else he has exchanged them for an allotment and started a farm.
+
+At the present moment the peasants own by far the greater part of the
+arable land in Russia, and every family owns in arable land at least six
+acres; and on an average in the densely populated districts, at least 10
+acres. In the more thinly populated districts of the north and south,
+the average increases.
+
+It is clear then that the peasant is an important unit, the most
+important unit in the nation. It is well then to look into the nature of
+this important unit, and to see what kind of being he is, and what are
+the mainsprings of his conduct.
+
+At the outset there probably exists certain preconceived notions which
+it is as well to get rid of at once.
+
+The first of these is that there is anything servile about the Russian
+peasant because during two centuries he endured serfdom. “In spite of
+the period of serfdom through which he has passed,” writes Sir Charles
+Eliot in his _Turkey in Europe_—and Sir Charles Eliot possesses
+first-hand knowledge of Russia—“the Russian muzhik is not servile; he
+thinks of God and the Tsar in one category, and of the rest of the world
+as more or less equal in another.”
+
+And Dostoievsky, in writing about Pushkin, says that one of this poet’s
+chief claims to greatness is that he recognized the intrinsic quality of
+self-respect in the Russian people, which they proved by the manly
+dignity of their behaviour when they were liberated from serfdom.
+
+The Russian people, in spite of centuries of serfdom, with the exception
+of individual instances, were not and never have been slaves.
+
+So much, I think, can be stated without fear of contradiction or
+controversy. Before going any further I want to clear the ground a
+little. The reader must be prepared to find, not only in foreign books
+about Russia, but in Russian books about Russia, and to meet with in
+conversation not only from foreigners who have travelled and lived in
+Russia, but in conversation with the Russians themselves, widely
+divergent and contradictory ideas and opinions with regard to the nature
+of the Russian peasant. He will hear on one side that he is intelligent,
+on the other that he is crassly obtuse. On the one hand that he is
+humane, on the other hand that he is brutal. He will find in Russian
+literature that by some writers he is exalted as the salt of the earth
+and the solution of life, and that by others he is decried as a
+hopeless, inert mass of ignorance and prejudices. M. Leroy Beaulieu in
+his _Empire des Tsars_ tells a story of how once, when he was travelling
+on the Volga, a “lady said to him, ‘How can you bother yourself about
+our muzhik? he is a brute, out of which nobody will ever be able to make
+a man;’ and how on the same day a landed proprietor said to him, ‘I
+consider the _contadino_ of North Italy to be the most intelligent
+peasant in Europe, but our muzhik could give him points.’”
+
+Further, most Russians will tell you that the peasant will rarely give
+himself away, and that to the outside observer of another class he
+probably is, and will always remain, a sealed book. The net result of
+all this is that readers may justly say to me, “And what can you know
+about the subject?” And it is to this very question that I think I owe
+some sort of reply before continuing to say anything else about the
+nature of the Russian peasant.
+
+My claims to be in a position to say certain things which I have got
+first hand about the Russian peasant are not, it is true, great; but I
+believe them to exist. They do not rest on what is called erudition. I
+am no expert in the difficult problems, economic and others, which are
+connected with the life of the Russian peasantry; but it so happens that
+I have been thrown together, so to speak, with the Russian peasant under
+peculiar circumstances. During the years I have spent in Russia I have
+made friends with peasants in various places, and have often in
+travelling had much talk and intercourse with them. But it is not
+chiefly on that that I base my observations—it is on this: that being in
+Manchuria during the greater part of the Russo-Japanese War, as I
+drifted about from one part of the army to another I was thrown together
+with the Russian soldier, who is a peasant, often on terms of absolute
+equality; that is to say, I was to him no longer a _barin_ (one of the
+upper classes), but a kind of camp follower, of which there were
+multitudes in Manchuria during the war—a man who, in their eyes, had a
+_barin_ himself. On one occasion I was asked where my _barin_ (master)
+was, and when I said I was my own _barin_, the peasant who was talking
+to me said he thought I was just a common man. Thus on many occasions I
+met, travelled with, and bivouacked with soldiers on their own footing,
+and shared their food, lodging, and talk _on equal terms_. And it was
+this experience which gave me glimpses into things, and an insight into
+certain manners and customs, which I should otherwise have ignored. The
+knowledge that I thus gleaned was confirmed to me by my subsequent
+travel in Russia, especially by journeys which I sometimes made in
+third-class carriages. But all this would not be in itself sufficient to
+give me any right to talk about the Russian peasant. All this would have
+given me the material, but not the means of using it. I base my claim to
+right of using it on one simple fact: I like the Russian peasant very
+much.
+
+In speaking of Pushkin’s love of the Russian peasant, Dostoievsky says:
+“Do not love me but love mine (that is to say, love what I love). That
+is what the people says when it wishes to test the sincerity of your
+love. Every member of the gentry, especially if he is humane and
+enlightened, can love, that is to say, sympathize with the people on
+account of its want, poverty, and suffering. But what the people needs
+is not that you should love it for its sufferings, but for itself; and
+what does ‘love it for itself’ signify? If you love what I love, honour
+what I honour. That is what it means, and that is what the people will
+answer to in you; and if it be otherwise, the man of the people will
+never count you as his own, however great your distress may be on his
+account.”
+
+Well, in saying that I like the Russian peasant very much, I mean that I
+honour what he honours, and his way of looking at life; his standards of
+right and wrong seem to me the sound and true.
+
+It is for this reason that, in all humility, I claim the right of
+deducing certain statements from the experience that I have had amongst
+the Russian people, and in laying them before the English reader.
+
+Now as to the chief characteristics of the Russian peasant. In the first
+place, and most important of all, he is intensely religious, and his
+religion is based on common sense.
+
+“Mysticism,” Mr. Chesterton once wrote, “was with Carlyle, as with all
+its genuine professors, only a transcendent form of common sense.
+Mysticism and common sense alike consist in a sense of the dominance of
+certain truths which cannot be formally demonstrated.”
+
+In this sense the Russian peasant is a mystic. His religion does not
+come to him through books or study or spiritual sciences, but it is the
+outcome of his experience, and of a very hard and bitter experience. The
+first and cardinal point of the peasant’s whole outlook on life is that
+he believes in God, and that he sees the will of God in all things, and
+that he regards a man who disbelieves in God as something abnormal, and
+as something not only abnormal but silly. He believes in God because it
+seems to him nonsensical not to do so.
+
+It would be easy to call as witnesses on this point a host of the most
+famous names in Russian literature. But the objection might be made (a
+false objection in my opinion, but still it might be made) that writers
+and poets idealize reality, and see in others what they feel in
+themselves or what they want to see; so from Russian literature I will
+only call one witness, and that is N. Garin, an engineer, who bought a
+property in the country and devoted many years solely to farming it, and
+was thus brought into daily constant and intimate touch and
+communication with the peasants.
+
+He begins relating his experiences thus: “By my conversations and
+intercourse with the peasants I could not help becoming acquainted with
+their inner life. As I got to know them I was struck on the one hand by
+their strength, patience, endurance, and by an inflexibility which
+attained to greatness, which made it easy to understand how the kingdom
+of Russia had come to be. On the other hand, I met with obduracy,
+routine, and a dull hostility to every innovation, which made it easy to
+understand why the Russian peasant lives so miserably. Two brothers
+lived in a village. One was married and the other was a bachelor. The
+married brother has five children and a wife, but is himself the only
+bread-winner; the unmarried brother lives in the family, and helps in
+the work with all his might, but he is old and ill. The married brother
+falls sick and dies. The old man is left with the family on his hands;
+he sets about to support it with the slender strength at his disposal.
+There are no savings, nothing put by. In the cottage half-naked children
+are running about, all with colds; they are crying; the cottage is cold,
+the atmosphere is foul, the calf squeals, the dead man is lying on the
+shelf, and on the face of the old man there is an expression of calm, as
+if all that were quite natural and had to be so.
+
+“‘It will be hard for you to feed eight mouths all by yourself?’ I ask.
+
+“‘And God?’ he answered.
+
+“God is all. Starvation is beckoning through the half-broken little
+window of the rotting house; the last bread-winner dies; there is a heap
+of children; the sister-in-law (the only woman) is sick; there is no
+money for the funeral; and he, being questioned as to his lot, answers,
+‘And God?’ And you feel something inexpressibly strong, unconquerable,
+and great.”
+
+I will supplement this story with a little piece of first-hand evidence
+which I gathered myself. This is only one instance out of a great many
+which I have come across in the course of my various sojourns in Russia.
+
+It was in a small provincial town some years ago, in the winter. I was
+walking late in the evening down one of the larger streets. It had been
+thawing, and the streets and the pavements were sloshy. It was dark.
+Just as I was reaching a street corner which faced a large open place, I
+became aware of the sound of muffled, persistent sobs. I looked round,
+and I saw sitting on the pavement, with his back to the wall, a little
+boy, a peasant’s child, who was softly crying his eyes out. He was
+sobbing slowly, not loudly, but persistently; not whining, or crying in
+the kind of way children cry when they fall down or quarrel, but he
+seemed to be sobbing out of the fullness of his little heart. He was not
+trying to attract attention, nor did he pay attention to me or to any
+one else. He seemed quite unconscious of the surrounding world, and
+plunged in his own grief. I stopped and asked him what was the matter.
+He answered that his father had sent him to the town to buy something (I
+forget what it was), and had given him the money, and that the money had
+been taken away from him. It was quite a small sum. He was afraid to go
+home. I at once gave him the money, and the little boy stood up, dried
+his eyes, and crossed himself. Then, without a word, he went home. He
+thanked God: it was not necessary to thank any one else. And I never saw
+anything like the expression of gratitude on his face as he crossed
+himself; but to me he did not say one word. What was the use? It was God
+who had come to his rescue, not I; you might just as well thank the
+violin after a concert for the beauty of the music.
+
+This is only the story of a child; but the child in Russia, just as
+anywhere else, is father of the man.
+
+It is difficult to bring home to the average Englishman the way in which
+religion enters into the daily life of the Russians, and especially into
+the daily life of the peasants. How often have I heard it said, how
+often have I read in newspapers, of the dark superstition into which the
+Russian people is plunged! If it be superstitious to regard religion not
+as a rather disagreeable episode belonging exclusively to Sunday, then
+the Russian peasant is superstitious indeed. If it be superstitious to
+cherish no _mauvaise honte_ with regard to religion, not to be ashamed
+of talking about God as a matter of fact, of saying one’s prayers in
+public, of going to Mass on Sundays and holidays, of fasting during Lent
+and other seasons of merrymaking at Easter, of crossing yourself before
+meals, of invoking the Saints, of revering images and relics, then the
+Russian peasant is superstitious indeed. But you must not put down such
+superstition to ignorance, for it has been shared by men such as Saint
+Augustine, Sir Thomas More, Lord Acton, and Pasteur—none of them what
+you would call ignorant men.
+
+Sometimes the traveller will note the fact that the Russian peasant will
+prostrate himself over and over again before an image, or cross himself
+over and over again mechanically. He will say the thing is an idle form
+that has no spiritual significance. He will be wrong. The Russian
+peasant fulfills the form and ritual of his religion as a matter of
+course. He is not more superstitious in the fulfilling of them than an
+Englishman is superstitious when he uncovers his head before the colours
+of a regiment. In the case of a Russian peasant his meticulous
+observance of ritual and form is just as much a matter of course to him,
+it is just as much based on common sense as that inflexible belief in
+God and the working and will of Providence which Garin so pointedly
+illustrates in the passage I have quoted above.
+
+The Russian peasant sees things in their true proportion. He believes in
+God, as a matter of course, because it is plain to him that God exists.
+He goes to church and observes the formalities of his religion because
+it is plain to him that is the right thing to do, just as it is plain to
+the ordinary English citizen that it is right to stand up when “God save
+the King” is being sung.
+
+The Russian peasant may be, and can be, and often is, as superstitious
+as you like about other things, but his superstition does not proceed
+from his religion. His superstitions are likewise a matter of tradition;
+he believes in the _domovoi_, for instance, the spirit that inhabits
+houses, well known once to the English peasantry, under the name of the
+hobgoblin; Milton calls him the drudging goblin:—
+
+              “And he by Friar’s lantern led
+              Tells how the drudging goblin sweat
+              To earn the cream bowl duly set,
+              When in one night, ere glimpse of man,
+              His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn
+              That ten day labourers could not end,
+              Then lies him down, the lubber-fiend,
+              And, stretched out all the chimney’s length,
+              Basks at the fire his hairy strength,
+              And crop-full, out of doors he flings,
+              Ere the first cock his matin rings.”
+
+The _domovoi_ in Russia is merely supposed to inhabit houses. I do not
+think he is ever suspected of working. He is good-natured but
+capricious. Each house has its goblin. He sits in the corner
+underground. If you move from one house to another you must give notice
+to the goblin and summon him to come with you. If you forget to do this,
+the goblin will be offended, and stay where he is left, and show marked
+hostility to the _domovoi_ brought by a new tenant. The two goblins will
+fight; china and furniture will be broken; and this will go on until the
+first householder comes and invites the goblin to his new house. Then
+everything will be all right once more.
+
+Garin says that he once said to a peasant: “What, in your opinion, is
+the _domovoi_—the devil?”
+
+The peasant, quite offended, answered: “Why should he be the devil? He
+does no harm.”
+
+“Then is he an angel?”
+
+“God forbid! How can he be an angel seeing that he’s hairy?”
+
+So the peasant agrees with Milton in thinking that the hobgoblin’s hide
+is covered with hair.
+
+The hobgoblin plays the part of a kind of moral barometer to the family,
+foretelling good or bad fortune. At supper-time he is heard to move, and
+then the elder of the family asks whether good or evil is impending. If
+it be bad, the _domovoi_ says, “Hu” (Hudo being the Russian for bad);
+and if good, he mutters, “D... D... D... D...” (Dobro being the Russian
+for good).
+
+To sum up the whole matter briefly, the religion of the Russian peasant
+is, if you analyze it (a thing which the peasant would, of course, never
+do), a working hypothesis of the world; or, to take Matthew Arnold’s
+phrase, a criticism of life; and it is more a solution, a philosophy
+which he has evolved not from books, not from professors or teachers,
+but from life itself. It is the fruit of his native common sense. In
+this observance of the forms of religion he likewise follows what has
+for him the sanction (_a_) of common sense; (_b_) of immemorial custom.
+
+Such a point of view one would think at first sight was not difficult to
+grasp. Experience has led me to believe that it is difficult for English
+people to grasp it. They go to Russia; they see the peasants prostrating
+themselves in churches, kissing images, taking off their hats as they
+pass churches; they see crowds feasting on Saint days; they see pilgrims
+asking for and receiving alms. And they say, “What backward people! How
+superstitious!” Or again (which is much worse) they say kindly, “What
+charming people. How picturesque!” In the first case they are being
+consciously superior, and in the second case they are being
+unconsciously condescending.
+
+In the first case they are simply pitying people for what they consider
+retrograde and backward; in the second case they are expressing an
+admiration whose real source is contempt. They do not know it is
+contempt, but it is. Their belief in their own superiority is so sure,
+and so sound, that they no more question it than the Russian peasant
+questions his belief in God.
+
+It is the same good-natured, easy-going contempt an English workman
+feels for foreign workmen when he happens to work abroad.
+
+I know of a case of an English gardener who was employed in a French
+country-house. An Englishman who was there asked him how he liked the
+French.
+
+“Oh! the French are all right,” he said, “if you treat them well. They
+are quite willing. You mustn’t bully them. You must treat them nicely
+and kindly. Of course _you can’t expect them to work like Englishmen_.”
+He talked of them good-naturedly, tolerantly, as if they were men of
+another race, and laboured under some great radical natural disadvantage
+through no fault of their own. Had he been talking of negroes instead of
+the inhabitants of l’Ile de France you would not have been surprised.
+
+This is exactly the attitude of the many English travellers, and of
+certain English residents in Russia, towards the Russian people. They do
+not, since they are not taught it at school—neither in board schools nor
+in private schools, nor in public schools, nor in grammar schools, and
+least of all at the universities—know that once the whole of Europe, and
+especially the English, looked on religion as the Russian peasants do
+now; or if they do know this, they thank Heaven that some parts of
+Europe, and in any case the English, have outgrown this backward
+ignorance and this dark philosophy.
+
+It is true, and it is only fair to state, that this attitude towards the
+religion of the Russian peasant is shared to some extent, but in a quite
+different manner, by the Russian educated classes, and more especially
+by the semi-educated. Of this I will write later in greater detail. But
+there is this great difference—the Russian educated and semi-educated
+classes may sometimes think these religious ideas of the Russian
+peasants childish; but not because they look on the peasant as a kind of
+inferior being, a savage or a “native.” They think the peasant’s
+religion is childish, because they think all religion is childish
+(whether the Pope’s, the Patriarch’s, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s,
+Mrs. Eddy’s, Mahomet’s, or Buddha’s), a thing which they have outgrown.
+But, as one Russian writer has pointed out, the Russian intellectuals
+are, on an average, not superior but inferior to the idea of religion,
+for they have never experienced it; and it is here that their attitude
+resembles that of the average Englishman. The average Englishman
+considers himself religiously almost immeasurably above the Russian
+peasant in enlightenment; it has never struck him that he may be below
+him. And until this humble thought strikes him, he will never be able to
+understand the religion of the Russian peasant.
+
+I was once talking to a lady who had been to Moscow about Russia. She
+said Moscow was very interesting, but she added: “I suppose it’s
+dreadful of me to say it, but all those _mosques_” (and by the mosques
+she meant the Cathedral and the Christian churches, which in their rites
+and customs probably resemble the early centuries of Christianity more
+closely than any in Europe) “were always so full of poor people, and
+such dirty people.” The idea of a church being a place where no
+distinction was made between rich and poor, where rich and poor could
+enter at any time of the day, where rich and poor jostled each other and
+crowded together in dense crowds to hear Mass on Sunday, was an idea
+entirely new and entirely foreign to her. And in expressing this, I
+venture to think she was below and not above the Russian peasant’s
+standard of religion.
+
+With regard to superstition, superstition is to the Russian peasant a
+thing quite apart from religion. It fills up a gap for him. In the
+region of the inexplicable, all matters that religion does not deal
+with, such as omens, the peasant puts down to other agencies, harmless
+agencies as a rule, such as hobgoblins; and here again he follows
+custom.
+
+I have said that the basis of the Russian peasant’s religion is common
+sense. Common sense is likewise the backbone or the mainspring of his
+material as well as of his spiritual existence, the key to his methods
+of work and his manner of play, his social code, his habits and customs;
+in a word, to his practice as well as to his theory.
+
+In the past much has been written on his backwardness, his obduracy, his
+love of routine, his persistence in remaining in old grooves, his hatred
+of innovation, his hostility towards all forms of progress. There is, of
+course, in many individual cases, a great deal of truth in these
+charges, but there is something else to be said as well. People are now
+beginning to say that often what at first sight appears to be wilful
+obduracy and blind and senseless conservatism is, in nine cases out of
+ten, merely the choice of the lesser of two evils, a choice obviously
+dictated by common sense.
+
+It is now being largely recognized by practical experts in agriculture
+in Russia, that the reason the peasant obstinately adhered to antiquated
+methods and turned a deaf ear to modern improvements and innovations,
+was not always that he was stupid, and not necessarily that he was
+obstinate, but that the improvements and the innovations suggested to
+him, although admirable in themselves, were, given his particular
+circumstances, likely to cause him more harm than good; the main fact
+being that he was too poor to take advantage of them; that the older
+method was the lesser evil, the newer method being the cause of a
+greater evil.
+
+I will give a few instances of what I mean.
+
+It is an admitted fact in countries that have a continental climate that
+the earth will only retain a sufficient quantity of moisture if it is
+ploughed early in spring and remains ploughed throughout the summer.
+Consequently the fallow land should be ploughed early in spring for the
+winter-sown crops. The peasant knows this well, but he does not plough
+early in spring, he ploughs late in summer; but if you ask him why, he
+puts to you the unanswerable question, “Where shall I put my cattle, if
+I plough early in the spring?”—the only place for his cattle being the
+fallow land, since all the remaining part of his land consists of
+growing crops. As soon as the harvest is over he can, of course, use the
+stubble for his cattle. This is an instance of what seems to be at first
+sight backward obstinacy, and is in reality expediency—the choice of the
+lesser evil, dictated by common sense.
+
+At one time every effort was being made to persuade the peasant to use a
+modern improved plough instead of the primitive instrument he preferred,
+which resembled that in use in the days of Abraham. He often refused to
+do so; but why? Not because he had anything against the new plough as an
+instrument, but because if he had not enough capital to buy one (its
+cost being 50 roubles = £5), and if he borrowed money from a rich
+peasant to do so, he risked losing all his substance; he risked being
+sold up in order to pay his debts. So in this case, the old-fashioned
+plough (which cost him only five roubles = 10s.) was a lesser evil than
+complete ruin.
+
+But, on the other hand, it has now been proved that as soon as the
+peasant can get the necessary capital, as soon as he can obtain credit
+from co-operative credit associations, he does not hesitate to buy iron
+ploughs, or even Canadian corn-cutters, or any modern implement you like
+to mention.
+
+Scientific agriculture is being widely taught at the present moment in
+Russia. Agricultural colleges are spreading, and the number of
+agricultural students is every day increasing. But it is the firm
+conviction of the most learned of the scientific agriculturists that all
+you can do for the peasant is to open for him doors on possibilities of
+teaching him what can be done; but that if it comes to teaching him
+_how_ to do a thing, you cannot. He knows _how_ to do everything much
+better than any theorist. Centuries of close and constant contact with
+the soil have taught him more than all the learning and all the theory
+in the world. You can bring to his notice new methods for him to try,
+new experiments; you can submit new possibilities to him; you can
+enlarge his horizon to any extent; you can educate him; you can provide
+him with new instruments; but in the practical use and application of
+knowledge it is he who will teach you, and not you who will teach him.
+He has the experience that only practice and centuries of practice can
+give.
+
+Not long ago one of the best known of the scientific Russian
+agriculturists spoke in this sense to some young students. He bade them
+remember that their whole task consisted in suggesting possibilities to
+the peasants; but if they met with opposition, they must never insist,
+for the peasant probably knew best, his knowledge being the fruit of the
+accumulated experience of countless generations. I believe, and I know
+that many Russians agree with me, that the history, the life, the
+philosophy, and the religion of the Russian peasants illustrate one
+immense fact: that the majority is always right in the long run. _Vox
+populi, vox Dei._ He may have temporary aberrations; but give him time,
+in the long run his view will be the right view.
+
+But some one may say, “Surely you do not wish to advance the dangerous
+and doctrinaire view that the land should be entirely in the hands of
+the peasant; for you have already stated that the peasant believes that
+the land is his, and that all the land should be in the hands of those
+that till it? Surely you are not in favour of the wholesale
+expropriation of land—of the total abolition of landlords?”
+
+My answer to this is, “Yes, I think the peasant is _right in the long
+run_, and I think he is right in thinking that in the long run the land
+not only should be, but will be, his.”
+
+At the present moment there are two kinds of landowners in Russia:—
+
+1. Absentee landowners, who rent their land to the peasant on short
+leases (on an average from one to six years) without sinking any capital
+either in buildings or in any other improvements.[1] A large portion (as
+I have already said) of the land thus rented to peasants by absentee
+landlords was sold to the peasants (with the assistance of the State
+land banks) in 1905; and it is generally admitted that the remainder,
+all the land still rented to the peasants, should become their permanent
+property. This is what is actually happening (slowly and gradually),
+with the assistance, again, of land banks.
+
+With regard to the land farmed by the landowners, the question is
+different. Such farming is carried on, as a rule, on a very large scale,
+at a great expenditure of capital, which is sunk in the land.
+
+At one time (in 1905) wholesale and immediate expropriation of all the
+land owned by the landowners was advocated by some political parties and
+individuals as the solution of the land question in Russia.
+
+But a wholesale act of expropriation, if put into force immediately,
+would not only bring about an economic crisis affecting the landowner,
+but it would reduce the standard of farming and diminish the productive
+capacity of the land, and impoverish the peasants themselves.
+
+The peasants, possessing little or no capital, would not be able to
+maintain the high standard of farming carried on by the landowners; and
+if the land hitherto farmed on this high standard were suddenly to be
+made over to them, they would earn less by trying to farm it without
+capital than they earn at present by working on the landowners’ land.
+
+If, then, wholesale and immediate expropriation is out of the question
+as a wise, practical, and beneficent measure, why and how is the peasant
+right in looking forward to the day when all the land will belong to
+him?
+
+Before such a state of things can be brought about, two things must
+happen to the peasant. He must acquire (_a_) capital, (_b_) a wider
+instruction in agricultural methods and a more extensive general
+instruction—in a word, a better education.
+
+This is actually happening now. The peasant is enabled to acquire
+capital through the existence of co-operative credit associations and
+land banks. And everywhere now, all over Russia, agricultural schools
+are increasing and instruction in improved agricultural methods is
+spreading. The creation of a body of agricultural experts stationed
+throughout the country under the supervision of the county councils, in
+order to advise the peasants and farmers on matters of agriculture, and
+the establishment of experimental farming stations on a comprehensive
+scale, have done this.
+
+When the peasant will be in possession of sufficient capital and
+instruction (and there does not appear to be anything Utopian in this
+prospect) in order to compete with the landowner who farms his own land,
+he will gradually oust the landowner altogether. Once possessed of the
+same means as the landlord, he will not only be his equal, but his
+superior; he will supersede him; he will be the master of the situation,
+and in the long run he will become _ipso facto_ the owner of all the
+arable land in Russia; and the change could thus come about without any
+economic crisis, and without imperilling the interests of the State.
+
+People may perhaps wonder why, during the revolutionary ferment of
+1905–6, when there was so much talk of expropriation in the air, when
+there was so much agricultural disturbance all over Russia, the peasants
+did not simply take all the land belonging to the landowners. It is not
+a sufficient answer to say the soldiery, remaining loyal, prevented any
+such thing. The soldiers are peasants, and there was probably not one
+soldier among them who was not convinced that the land belonged to the
+tillers of it by right.
+
+It will perhaps not be thought fantastic if I here again repeat, as an
+answer to this question, the democratic theory, which I know is so
+distasteful to many, that the majority are always right; that the
+peasants, in a vague and inarticulate fashion, vaguely knew or dimly
+felt that if they did such a thing the only immediate result would be
+wholesale anarchy; and that it was their fundamental common sense which
+unconsciously led them to insist on the partial sale of the land let to
+them by the landowners, and to rest contented for the moment with this
+preliminary step. They would, of course, not be able to explain the
+matter thus; but this was in all probability the explanation of their
+conduct.
+
+I repeat here, lest the reader should think I am foisting on him
+fantastic stuff and idealistic theory, that the individual peasant is as
+often as not obstinate, lazy, and backward; that all the peasants are in
+need not only of wider instruction in agricultural methods, but also of
+general all-round education.
+
+The individual peasant would not come out with any theory as to the
+lesser of two evils; he would probably defend his backward practice as
+being the best, or as being that which had always been followed.
+
+Nevertheless, in spite of this, those habits of the peasant which are
+the result of accumulated experience have, if you look into them, a
+fundamental basis of common sense, even though the individual peasant
+may be unaware of the fact. The immemorial popular tradition and custom,
+the stored and accumulated wisdom of the peasantry (to which the immense
+quantity of popular proverbs and saws which exist in Russia are as the
+leaves are to a tree) according to which they act as a body, will be
+found to be sound and right in the long run, although the average
+individual peasant may be unable to give any reason for accepting and
+following the dictates of that wisdom which is his inheritance; he may
+be not only incapable of defining it, he may be unaware of its
+existence. But as a member of the community to which he belongs he will
+nevertheless apply that wisdom, as circumstances call for it, and
+express it by the acts of his daily life; and his individual voice will
+be a part of that larger voice which has sometimes been thought to be
+identical with the voice of God.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III.
+                             THE NOBILITY.
+
+
+The very word nobility in connection with Russia is misleading. There is
+no English word which is the equivalent of the Russian word for
+nobility—_dvorianstvo_. In French, there are two words, _noblesse de
+cour_, which correspond to the Russian word.
+
+The Russian word _dvorianin_, which we translate, for want of a better
+word, noble, means a man attached to a Court, and courtier would be the
+right translation, if courtier did not happen to mean something else.
+The Russian noble is a Court servant, who is entitled by the service he
+renders to the State to an hereditary rank. Nobility accrues by right to
+the man who has reached a certain definite step or _tchin_ in the army
+or in the civil service.
+
+The service, moreover, is open to everybody who can pass a certificate
+examination at the end of his school time. During the whole of the
+eighteenth century, and the first part of the nineteenth century, from
+the reign of Peter the Great to the end of the reign of Alexander I.,
+every single officer of the nobility army, and every single civil
+servant holding an equivalent rank, became _ipso facto_ a noble.
+
+The lowest rank in the army, that of an ensign, conferred the right of
+nobility.[2]
+
+Later on, in 1822, in 1845, and in 1855, the grade which conferred
+hereditary nobility was raised.
+
+The net result of all this is that (_a_) the nobility as a class is
+enormous (in European Russia the hereditary nobility number about
+600,000); (_b_) there can be nothing aristocratic about such a nobility.
+
+This does not mean that the descendants of old families do not exist in
+Russia. Such families exist, and are, perhaps, more ancient than any in
+Europe. Moreover, a certain number of names and families stand out
+amidst the encircling obscurity, some of them illustrious with an almost
+fabulous antiquity, like names in a saga or an epic, and others
+illustrious from great services rendered in more modern times. Russian
+history is “bright with names that men remember”; on the one hand names
+recalling those of the Knights of the Round Table or the heroes of the
+Niebelungenlied, on the other hand names resembling that, say, of the
+Duke of Wellington.
+
+Titles have little to do with the matter: amongst this little band of
+the illustrious, some of the families have titles of recent origin;
+others, again, almost incredibly remote both in lineage and fame, have
+no titles at all.
+
+The great mass of the nobility have neither title nor any outward sign
+to distinguish them from the herd of nobles, with the exception of the
+collateral branches of the royal family.
+
+Russia was originally a conglomeration of small principalities (all
+descending from, all collateral branches of, one prince), grouped at one
+time under the leadership of Kiev, and later on absorbed by the
+principality of Moscow, which eventually became first a kingdom, and
+then _the_ kingdom. When Moscow absorbed all the minor principalities,
+the princes, bereft of their principalities, still retained their
+titles. “Prince” is, therefore, the only true Russian title that exists
+in Russia.
+
+The titles of graf (count) and baron are borrowed from Western Europe.
+There is no word either for count or baron in the Russian language, and
+the German terms are used. These titles are confined to a few families,
+and are either titles of recent creation, conferred by the sovereign for
+special services, or they denote families of foreign extraction and
+origin.
+
+About two-thirds of the princely families descend from the ancient
+sovereigns of Russia, and about forty of them go as far back as Rurick,
+the oldest of all Russian sovereigns. Such are the families of the
+Dolgoruky, Bariatinsky, Obolensky, Gortchakov, Khovansky, Galitsin,
+Trubetskoy.
+
+As far as lineage and antiquity are concerned, these families are as old
+as any in Europe; but in spite of the existence of these ancient
+families, whose ramifications are innumerable (for instance, there are
+about three or four hundred Galitsins, male and female), there is no
+such thing in Russia as a political aristocracy.
+
+One of the causes of this state of things is probably the democratic
+system which prevails in every Russian family, be it that of a prince or
+of a peasant, of dividing property equally amongst the whole family; and
+as the title is likewise inherited by every member of the family as the
+process of subdivision goes on, it sometimes happens that the sole
+inheritance of the descendant of an illustrious family is his name.
+
+One would have thought this constant process of subdivision must have
+ultimately decimated all the large estates in Russia. It probably would
+have done so had it not been for the size of the country, the perpetual
+opening out of new territory, the unceasing colonization of such
+remnants, and the consequent rise in the value of land.
+
+Moreover, the division of property is made among the male members of the
+family only. The female members of a family receive only a fourteenth
+share of the patrimony; they receive a marriage portion, and sometimes
+nothing besides.[3]
+
+There is also in Russia, as everywhere else, what the French would call
+“_une aristocratie mondaine_.” Even here there is less spirit of caste
+than in other European countries. It is impossible to define what
+constitutes and what limits this society in Russia, just as it is
+impossible to define what constitutes the limits of any such society
+anywhere. It has nothing necessarily to do with the governing class, and
+nothing to do with the great mass of the nobility, and nothing
+necessarily to do with illustrious names or services, and is hall-marked
+neither by wealth nor by titles, but by a freemasonry of manner and
+culture. It is a society consisting of many separate groups, which live
+their own life and touch each other at certain points. Thus in St.
+Petersburg there is an _erste Gesellschaft_, who all talk French as a
+matter of course, and very often English as well, and who at one time
+talked French better than their own language. The younger generation of
+this class, however, know Russian well.
+
+Thus it is that in speaking of the Russian nobility as a whole and as a
+class—and it is a vast class—the English reader must put out of his head
+all ideas of aristocracy such as it existed in England, France, Germany,
+Spain, and Italy, and realize the following facts:—
+
+     1. The noble in Russia is a State servant.
+
+     2. Any one can enter the State service if he passes the requisite
+          examination.
+
+     3. The attainment of a certain rank in the State service carries
+          with it the rights of hereditary nobility.
+
+     4. There is no political aristocracy in Russia.
+
+     5. Until 1861 only the nobility had the right to own land in
+          Russia.
+
+     6. There is no such thing as a territorial aristocracy in Russia.
+
+How is it, then, that if until this year 1861 the nobility alone had the
+right of owning land in Russia, there is no such thing as a territorial
+aristocracy? And how is it, if innumerable descendants of old princely
+families exist at the present moment in Russia, there is no such thing
+as a political aristocracy?
+
+The answer to these two questions is to be found in the history of the
+past, and, without going into any elaborate historical disquisition, the
+roots of the matter are fairly easy to trace.
+
+In the earlier times of Russian history, long before the invasion of the
+Tartars, before the Norman Conquest in England, Russia was divided into
+principalities, which were governed by princes. Every prince had a body
+of followers, who constituted around his person a kind of armed militia.
+This militia was called the _druzhina_. Its members were free. They
+could serve whom they pleased. They could pass from the service of one
+prince to another. Out of this class of armed servants arose the
+_boyars_, who were likewise the voluntary servants of the princes, and
+who could serve whichever prince they pleased. They were naturally
+inclined to choose the richest and most powerful prince, and thus they
+were attracted to the Court of Moscow, and thus the minor principalities
+became weaker in resources and poorer in followers, and were gradually
+absorbed one after another by the Grand Duchy of Moscow. And when Moscow
+became the central and predominant kingdom of Russia, the boyars became
+the servants of the Tsar of Moscow. But the boyars did not serve the
+monarch for nothing; in return for their service they received land.
+Originally the servants of the princes were remunerated for their
+services by receiving allotments of land, which passed from father to
+son, as well as by money, and the revenues accruing from certain
+Government appointments. Had the boyars continued to possess hereditary
+allotments, and nothing but hereditary allotments, they might have grown
+into a caste of territorial aristocrats. As it was, as Russia grew
+bigger, and when Northern Russia was annexed to the kingdom of Moscow,
+the only new sources of capital were the immense stretches of new land
+acquired by the Tsar of Moscow. Henceforward the Tsar, instead of giving
+the boyars hereditary allotments of land in return for their service,
+gave them temporary allotments of land in the newly-acquired territory.
+These allotments were in theory supposed to belong to the Tsar’s servant
+so long, and so long only, as he served, but in practice they generally
+belonged to the owner during the whole of his lifetime. A grant of land
+of this kind was called a _pomestie_ (manor), and the owner of it a
+_pomeshchik_, which came in the course of time to be, and is at present,
+the ordinary Russian word for a landowner.
+
+Thus the Tsar accomplished at one swoop many different objects. He
+distributed the men of service in the interior and at the frontier of
+the country, and by granting them only the temporary lease of the land
+in distant parts of the country, he prevented the growth of a strong
+landed aristocracy whose existence and rivalry he feared. He made these
+newly-created landowners into a barrier against foreign invasion, and
+into an instrument of national defence; the land became a means for the
+upkeep of the army, since the landowners constituted the army, and the
+armed servant in return for his service received land, which, in
+addition to being a wage, made that service possible by giving him a
+means of upkeep.
+
+The principle was established that the servant of the State should be
+rewarded for his services by the possession of land; and soon the
+corollary followed that the owner of land _must_ serve.
+
+Hereditary holdings still existed; but gradually the right of
+administrating them came to depend on service. In the sixteenth century,
+in the kingdom of Moscow, all owners of hereditary holdings were State
+servants. A man who inherited a holding was obliged to serve if he
+wished to continue to possess the hereditary ownership of it.
+
+Thus it was that the nobility in Russia acquired the dual nature of
+landowner and servant of the State. The servant of the State became a
+landowner, and only on the condition of being a servant of the State, as
+has already been stated.
+
+The result of all this was that the nobility took no roots in the land.
+Their interest was at Court. Their land was merely their pay. Thus no
+landed or territorial aristocracy came into existence, as in other
+European countries. In Russia there are no feudal castles, no families
+taking their names from places, no titles derived from property, no
+_von_ and _zu_, no _de_, no Lord So-and-So of So-and-So; comparatively
+few stone houses. The noble generally lives in a wooden house, which has
+the nature of a temporary makeshift residence.
+
+Nevertheless there was an obstinate attempt on the part of the Russian
+nobility to form a political aristocracy.
+
+The boyars, grouping themselves round the throne of Moscow, attempted to
+do this. They organized themselves into a complicated hierarchy,
+according to which precedence depended on the pedigree of their
+forefathers. The duties and position of each boyar was written down in a
+complicated kind of peerage called “books of pedigree.” His rank had to
+remain exactly what that of his forefathers had been.
+
+Organized in this fashion, the boyars became an hereditary, stationary,
+and exclusive caste, perpetually quarrelling over questions of pedigree,
+the rights and wrongs of which were extremely difficult to determine.
+
+By the time Ivan the Terrible came to the throne (1547) the boyars were
+individually powerful, but the very nature of such an organization
+precluded all idea of solidarity and union. Every single noble wished to
+be _primus inter pares_. Every family was at war with its equals. Ivan
+the Terrible dealt with the boyars individually by cutting off their
+heads. The books of pedigree were abolished in the reign of Peter the
+Great’s predecessor, and the name boyar was abolished by Peter the
+Great.
+
+Henceforward the service of your forefathers was no longer of any
+account. Neither lineage nor rank counted any longer. Your rank depended
+henceforth on your _tchin_—that is to say, the post you held in the
+service of the State; and that, in its turn, depended on your personal
+merit, on the nature of your service. The Russian nobility became a
+class of State servants in which the hereditary principle ceased to
+exist; and although some of the privileges which Peter the Great took
+away from the hereditary nobility were restored to them by his
+successors, the great fabric of the State service which he created still
+exists. So does the _tchin_, with its fourteen grades, created by Peter
+the Great. A boy leaving his college or gymnasium, and having passed
+what the Germans call his _abiturienten examen_, and what in some of our
+public schools is called a certificate examination, has access to the
+lowest rung of the official ladder.
+
+University degrees confer a _tchin_ on the student, and with every fresh
+diploma he receives he ascends a further rung of the ladder. For
+instance, a son of a peasant, if he goes to school, passes his
+examinations, and finishes his course at the university, may serve, say,
+in the department of Railway Traffic Organization, and by ascending one
+grade of the ladder after another, he may, partly by luck and partly by
+merit, end by being Minister of Finance or Prime Minister.
+
+The successors of Peter the Great exempted the nobility from compulsory
+service; and Catherine II. not only confirmed this exemption, but
+increased and enlarged the privileges of the nobility. She made the
+nobility into a privileged class. In order to prepare the way for local
+self-government, she created intermediate powers between the throne and
+the people, and gave the nobility a part to play in local
+administration, and roped in the merchants to co-operate with them, thus
+endeavouring to form a _bourgeoisie_. The nobility enjoyed the privilege
+of appointing local justices of the peace and local officials. The
+administration of every district had to pass through the hands of the
+nobility in the shape of a marshal, in some respects a kind of
+lord-lieutenant[4]; one presided over every district, and one over every
+province, and both were elected by the Assembly of Nobles. The theory
+was that the influence of the marshals of the nobility would
+counterbalance the action of the governor of the province, an official
+appointed directly by the Crown. This was the theory, and a theory it
+more or less remained owing to the apathy of the nobility, who failed to
+take full advantage of their privileged situation. Nevertheless the
+nobility did play a considerable part in local administration; and
+consequently, in proportion as they tended to become bureaucrats, they
+ceased being landowners. They had less and less time to look after their
+property. They ceased, for the greater part, to be practical and
+practising landowners, and they left the management of their estates in
+the hands of their stewards, and often used their estates as a means of
+raising money, so that in 1859, on the eve of the emancipation,
+two-thirds of the estates and the nobility were in pawn, and the
+remaining third was often mortgaged to individuals.
+
+The privileges granted to the nobility by the successors of Peter the
+Great could not fail to affect the peasantry. The peasants were at this
+time tethered to the soil. Peter the Great had tightened the bonds which
+attached them to the soil, and Catherine II. had done nothing to loosen
+their bonds. In fact, the situation of the peasants, instead of
+improving, had grown worse. The rights of the master over the serf had
+been extended. The master had the power of dealing administratively with
+the serf; he could banish him to Siberia, sentence him to penal
+servitude, and could sell him apart from the land. The situation of the
+serf was not only crying out for reform, but the peasants knew and
+complained that the whole logical principle of the case for serfdom had
+been violated.
+
+The peasantry rightly considered that serfdom was a temporary measure
+coinciding with the compulsory service of the nobility. If the nobility
+ceased to serve the Tsar, logically they should cease to serve the
+nobility, because the nobility were only given the land on condition of
+serving the Tsar, and on that condition alone, and the peasants belonged
+to the land.
+
+The discontent of the peasants expressed itself in risings, which were
+sometimes serious, and the moral feeling against the existence of
+serfdom became stronger and stronger. And since the nobles were too much
+occupied with other affairs to look after their estates in person, and
+their serfs in a patriarchal fashion, there was, as has already been
+said in Chapter I., no possible argument left in favour of serfdom.
+
+Nevertheless, as Catherine II. saw clearly, the emancipation of the
+serfs could only be carried out with the co-operation of the nobility.
+In her reign the time had not come for this, because the nobility were
+opposed to the reform. The reform came about in 1861, and by it the
+nobility lost the unique privilege of being the only class in Russia
+able to own land, and the access to landed proprietorship in Russia was
+thrown open to all classes.
+
+When the immense act of expropriation which the emancipation of the
+serfs entailed took place, about half the landowners in Russia
+disappeared. Quite a new and mixed class of landowners came into
+existence: merchants and absentee landowners who leased their land to
+the peasants, and finally those who sunk their capital in the land and
+tried to carry on agriculture on rational principles.
+
+I have already spoken of the result of absentee landownership in Russia,
+and the further sales of land which were made to the peasants in 1905,
+and of the exemption of the peasantry from compulsory communal land
+tenure. Looking back on the situation now, one is aware that the landed
+nobility in Russia is being slowly and gradually oozed out of existence;
+it is being subjected to a slow process of expropriation in favour of
+the peasants, the merchants, and the new capitalists; and in the course
+of time, as soon as the peasantry has the means, the capital, and the
+knowledge to compete with it on equal terms, the nobility as a caste of
+landowners will disappear altogether.
+
+The two questions which I put towards the beginning of this chapter: How
+is it there exists no political aristocracy in Russia? and, How is it
+that there exists no territorial aristocracy, in spite of the fact that
+until 1861 the nobility had the exclusive right of owning the land? can
+perhaps be answered thus:—
+
+There is no political aristocracy in Russia, because as far back as we
+can see in Russian history we find no traces of that spirit of caste and
+solidarity which creates a compact body, sharing a common outlook, and
+pursuing a definite political and social aim. As far back as we can see
+in Russian history the nobles were State servants, and when they were
+given privileges which were not dependent on service, they were
+powerless to make themselves into anything else. They had neither the
+instinct nor the desire to do so.
+
+There have in Russian history been aristocrats, but no aristocracy; and
+when those aristocrats were powerful, they were bound together by no
+_esprit de corps_, and by no common object: thus it was easy for the
+Crown to disintegrate them.
+
+There has been no territorial aristocracy, because the land was a
+temporary loan made to the nobility in return for service. When the
+service ceased to be compulsory, the land was at once reclaimed by its
+original owners, the men who tilled it. A hundred years after service
+ceased to be compulsory for the nobles the peasants were given back a
+great part of the land, and ever since then they have been gradually
+getting back more and more of it, and in the course of time there is no
+doubt that they will end by getting back all of it.
+
+The Russian nobility is a thing apart. An aristocracy on the Western
+European pattern no more exists in Russia than do feudal castles on the
+European pattern. There is an analogy between the flat uniform surface
+of the landscape in Russia, the absence of sharp mountain ranges and
+deep valleys, of variety and variegated features, and the nature of
+Russian institutions. The Russian nobility is, like the Russian
+landscape, devoid of sharp features—all one level. It is democratic, and
+averse to the prominence of individual personalities. All the features
+that are characteristic of aristocratic tendencies, such as
+primogeniture, spirit of caste, class exclusiveness, do not exist. The
+Russian nobility is democratic, and it lacks the salient features and
+the sharp and defined character which has distinguished in the past the
+nobility in the other countries of Europe.
+
+It may very likely now occur to the reader to ask if there is not and
+never has been such a thing as a political aristocracy in Russia; and if
+the Russian nobility is so democratic, why was there ever any discontent
+in Russia? Why was there such a thing as Nihilism and a revolutionary
+movement?
+
+It would seem at first sight that a system in which rank was entirely
+dependent on merit, and in which the service was open to everybody, left
+nothing to be desired, as far as democracy is concerned. In certain
+respects it is obviously democratic, in others it is fatal to all free
+democracy.
+
+The principle, of course, is as democratic as possible; but what happens
+in practice? In practice you have a gigantic machine worked by a
+governing class of officials which is absolutely uncontrolled by public
+opinion.
+
+Any one can get into the governing class, that is true; but nobody who
+is not in it can check its action, and at one period nobody could even
+criticize it. The result is the triumph of bureaucracy at the expense of
+any kind of democracy or of any kind of aristocracy; while the only
+thing that profits by it is arbitrary despotism. And though the system
+is theoretically favourable to the advancement of merit, it is a
+thousand times more favourable to mediocrity, routine, office-hunting,
+officialdom, red tape, to the stifling of all individual initiative, and
+the shirking of all moral responsibility. The chief evil result of the
+system was the uncontrolled arbitrary character of the central
+government and the local administration as carried on by the provincial
+governors and other officials of the Government; and it was against this
+arbitrariness that public opinion in Russia revolted, and expressed
+itself either by militant acts of revolt, assassinations, or explosions,
+or peaceably in a demand for political reform. And in this peaceable
+demand the nobility played an important part.
+
+I have already said that Catherine II. gave privileges to the nobility
+with the idea of preparing the way for local self-government. She knew
+that in her time such institutions could only be elementary, and that
+real local self-government was impossible, since besides the nobility
+and the merchants, the rest of the population were serfs; but she
+determined to lay the foundations of self-government, and to prepare the
+way for the future. She gave the nobility privileges which in other
+countries must certainly have led to a conflict with the Crown; but in
+her time nothing of the kind happened, since the nobility took no
+advantage of their situation. But the situation which she created did
+ultimately lead to a conflict with the Crown, because it was the organs
+of the local self-government which voiced the demand for representative
+institutions in Russia, and headed the movement which obtained them. The
+first step towards local self-government was made by Catherine II., the
+second step was made by Alexander II. In 1864, in addition to the
+Assemblies of Nobles, Zemstvos (county councils) were created,
+containing representatives of every class; later, the nobility and the
+peasants elected their representatives. Every district of every
+government or province was given a Zemstvo, or county council; and above
+this (and formed from the district councils) each government or province
+was given a county council. Both the district and the provincial county
+councils were presided over by the marshals of the nobility.
+
+Here were the means and the instrument at least of checking the
+uncontrolled action of the bureaucratic machine; but the natural
+corollary of local self-government—namely, central political
+representation—was for the time lacking. Moreover, from time to time the
+officials appointed by the Government were given powers to check the
+action of the county councils.
+
+Ten years passed. The enthusiasm which greeted the era of reform in the
+’sixties died out in a smoke of disillusion, and a revolutionary
+movement sprang up, and a Nihilist fever, culminating in the
+assassination of the Emperor Alexander II. in 1881, when he was on the
+eve of granting a constitution to Russia. This shelved all question of
+reform for another twenty-five years; a period of sheer reaction
+followed; and it was not until the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 that the
+public discontent found expression in a manner which had to be reckoned
+with.
+
+It was now that the Zemstvos played a supremely important part. They
+headed the constitutional demand for reform, which had developed side by
+side with a revolutionary movement. And they obtained first the promise
+of a consultative House of Representatives, and finally, on October 17,
+1905, a charter promising to the people the foundations of civic
+liberty, the convocation of a Duma, and the promise that no laws should
+in future be passed without receiving the sanction of the
+representatives of the nation. The rank and file of the army which
+brought this to pass were the whole of the educated middle class of
+Russia, but its leaders and spokesmen were the members of the nobility
+in the county councils. It was not the nobility as a class which acted
+and brought this about, but the instruments of local government, the
+county councils; and every single organ of local government, each county
+council, had at the head of it a member of the nobility. So far, then,
+from acting as a separate caste, the Russian nobility, in the movement
+and demand for reform and emancipation, simply expressed the opinion of
+the man in the street; and this was all the easier, for the simplest
+definition of the Russian noble, and one which sums up the whole matter,
+is that in Russia the noble is almost every tenth man in the street.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IV.
+                        THE GOVERNMENT MACHINE.
+
+
+Up till October 30, 1905 (O.S., October 7), Russia was an unlimited
+autocracy. The Emperor bore the title of Unlimited Autocrat of all the
+Russias. But Russia possessed, nevertheless, certain administrative and
+legislative institutions. There was a consultative assembly called the
+Council of Empire, founded by Alexander I., whose business it was to
+make laws; and a Senate, founded by Peter the Great, an administrative
+institution, whose business it was to see that the laws and the
+Emperor’s ukases were carried out. The Emperor could always issue
+special ukases, and he could suggest any laws to the Ministers whom he
+appointed.
+
+The initiative of legislation was in the hands of the Emperor’s
+Ministers. They presented laws to the Council of Empire, which discussed
+and amended them, and presented them, together with the findings of the
+majority and the minority, and sometimes the finding of an individual
+member, which were the outcome of their deliberations, to the Emperor
+for his sanction. In this manner the fundamental laws of the empire were
+drawn up.
+
+On October 30, 1905, this state of things was profoundly modified by the
+publication of an imperial manifesto which laid down certain new
+principles of government.
+
+If these principles were carried out in practice, Russia would no longer
+be an unlimited autocracy. What it would exactly be is a little
+difficult to define. In the old days the Government of Russia was
+defined as being an autocracy tempered by assassination. It would be
+difficult to define it exactly as it is at the present moment. It is a
+limited autocracy; an autocracy limited indirectly by the existence of
+legislative institutions.
+
+At the same time, it was technically a mistake to call the manifesto a
+constitution, because the Sovereign did not categorically divest himself
+of his autocratic rights; he took no oath to any constitution; all he
+did was to grant his subjects certain privileges, which, if carried out,
+would limit the purely autocratic character of his power. He himself
+remained an autocrat. He could, if he saw fit to do so in the future,
+take back the privileges he had granted. The manifesto was a charter
+rather than a constitution. It promised to the people the foundations of
+civic liberty based on the liberty of the person, liberty of conscience,
+liberty of speech, and the right of forming unions, societies, and
+associations. It announced that a National Assembly (the Duma) would be
+convoked, elected by the people, who would henceforward be called upon
+to co-operate in the government of the country. It laid down the
+principle that in future no law should come into force without
+previously receiving the sanction of the Parliament.
+
+A National Assembly elected by the people was not a new phenomenon for
+Russia. Ever since 1550 National Assemblies appear from time to time in
+the course of Russian history. They failed to become a permanent feature
+and factor in Russian life owing to the strife of classes. The
+population split up into classes, and this was due to the birth of
+economic problems and the manner in which they were solved; the peasants
+became slaves in the hands of the landowners, and the National Assembly
+ceased to be national, and became representative of an upper class which
+was divided against itself, owing to the conflicting personal interests
+it fostered.
+
+The Emperor Nicholas II. in convoking a National Council was not
+creating a new precedent, but resuscitating an old one. The word Duma
+means Council, and the Tsars of Moscow in olden times had governed with
+the aid of an assembly of nobles called the Council of Boyars.
+
+When the manifesto was issued in 1905, it was clear that the fundamental
+laws of the empire made no provision for a Duma, and that if a Duma were
+to assemble on the basis of the manifesto, its situation in the State
+and its relation to the Sovereign would be undefined. For this reason a
+revised version of the fundamental laws of the empire was confirmed and
+published on April 23, 1906.
+
+This revised edition of the fundamental laws defined the position of the
+Sovereign with regard to the Duma. According to its provisions, the
+supreme autocratic power was vested in the person of the Emperor; but
+according to another section it was laid down that the Sovereign
+exercises legislative power in conjunction with the Council of Empire
+and the Duma.
+
+The principle of the manifesto that no law should come into force
+without previously receiving the sanction of the legislative institution
+was confirmed.
+
+The Emperor retained the title of Autocrat, and concentrated in his
+person the legislative, executive, and judicial powers; but the
+substantive “Autocrat” was no longer preceded by the adjective
+“Unlimited.”
+
+The executive powers of the Sovereign entitled him to convene, adjourn,
+and prorogue the Council of Empire and the Duma; to dissolve the Duma;
+and to dismiss the elected members of the Council of Empire before the
+term of their mandates, but not without fixing the date of fresh
+selections and of the session of a new Duma.
+
+The Emperor retained the right of appointing the president, the
+vice-president, and half the members of the Council of Empire; the right
+of veto, and the sanction of laws; the sole initiative of any changes in
+the fundamental laws; and, as has already been said, he shared the
+initiative in all branches of legislation with both the Houses.
+
+The Emperor also retained the right of issuing special ukases,
+sanctioning unforeseen expenditure not provided for in the Estimates,
+for emergencies in case of war, and loans for expenditure in war.
+
+The fundamental laws also contained an emergency clause of another kind,
+according to which the Emperor, by special ukase, can promulgate laws in
+cases of emergency when the Houses are not in session, subject to their
+being subsequently submitted to them for approval. But no change may be
+made in the fundamental laws in virtue of this clause, nor may it modify
+the legislative institutions and the electoral laws for the two Houses.
+Moreover, any regulation made in this way ceases to be in force if, in
+two months after the beginning of the session of the Duma, no Bill is
+introduced by the Duma confirming it, or if a Bill is introduced and
+rejected.[5]
+
+The executive powers of the Emperor consist in the appointment and
+dismissal of the Prime Minister and the Ministers, the direction of
+foreign affairs, the proclamation of martial law and any modified kind
+of martial law, and the command of the military and naval forces.
+
+The Emperor has also certain judicial powers, such as the confirmation
+of the verdicts of criminal courts.
+
+At this moment, then, the legislative institutions of Russia consist of
+the Council of Empire and the Duma. The Council of Empire is the Upper
+House; half of its members are elected, and they receive their mandates
+in certain proportions from the synod, the nobility, the universities,
+the corporation of merchants, and from Poland. They are elected for a
+term of nine years. The remaining members (including the president and
+the vice-president) are appointed by the Emperor.
+
+The Upper House shares with the Lower House the right of initiative in
+legislation, as well as that of voting supplies and of making
+interpellations.
+
+The Lower House, as has just been said, has also the right of initiative
+legislation; but certain subjects, according to the fundamental laws,
+are outside its competence—namely, the institutions of the imperial
+court; the imperial family; war and naval departments; the jurisdiction
+of military and naval courts.
+
+On the other hand, the imperial budget and the budgets of individual
+Ministries, and the authorization of loans, are within its competency.
+It has also the right of making interpellations. There is not, as in the
+English House of Commons, a certain time put aside every day for
+questions. Notice is given of interpellation, and the question of
+whether it shall be regarded as pressing or not is put to the vote. If
+expedition is voted for, the interpellation must be answered by the
+Ministers within a month; if extreme expedition is voted for, within
+three days; if expedition is not voted for, the answer is given within
+an indefinite period.
+
+The right of interpellation, and the larger fact that an assembly exists
+where discussion of public affairs is public, are, as is the case with
+most Parliaments, the chief assets in the influence of the Duma. As far
+as actual legislation is concerned, the Upper House can throw out any of
+the Bills which the Lower House passes.
+
+The electoral law is exceedingly complicated. The degree of suffrage it
+confers is very far from being universal. In the first place, elections
+are indirect; in every government voters elect a certain number of
+electors, who in their turn elect members to represent the government in
+the Duma. Only males who have reached the age of twenty-five have the
+right to vote; and all those who are in any branch of military service
+are excluded.
+
+The voters are (_a_) those who vote by property qualification—that is to
+say, persons residing in the various districts who can satisfy a
+property qualification, the amount and classification of which depends
+upon their occupation. For instance, landowners are classified according
+to the amount of land they possess, and merchants or all persons engaged
+in commercial pursuits, according to their trade licence. This class of
+voter must either own immovable property, hold a trade licence, be in
+the receipt of a pension and salary arising from his employment in the
+Government, municipal, or railway service, or be the occupant of a
+lodging hired in his name.
+
+For such voters one year’s residence in the polling district is
+required.
+
+As the qualification is high, the number of voters is necessarily
+limited.
+
+(_b_) A second class of voter consists of peasants whose names are on
+the rolls of the rural communities—that is to say, heads of households.
+One year’s residence in the polling district is necessary for them also.
+
+(_c_) A third class, consisting of town voters, artisans, and employees
+in factories, works, and railway shops. Six months’ residence in polling
+district is required.
+
+An election is carried on thus:—
+
+All the voters are divided into five groups: Landowners; peasants; town
+voters (two groups according to their property qualification); artisans,
+etc.
+
+Each of these groups elects separately, by a system of two degrees, a
+certain number of electors who shall represent them at a general meeting
+of the government or province. This large Provincial Assembly,
+consisting of landowners, peasants, and town dwellers, meets together,
+and elects a certain number of members to represent the government or
+province in the Duma. In this assembly the landed class interest and the
+richer merchants and town dwellers have the advantage in numbers, and
+are consequently in the majority. In order therefore to safeguard to a
+certain extent the interests of the other classes, the Government
+Assembly must first of all elect one member to represent each of the
+following classes:—
+
+  (_a_) The peasants;
+
+  (_b_) Landowners;
+
+  (_c_) The town electors (only in certain governments);
+
+  (_d_) The artisans (only in six governments).
+
+And as each government is entitled to return a certain number of members
+fixed by the law,[6] the requisite number is completed by electing
+members from the remaining total of electors.
+
+There are two exceptions to the general procedure: the largest cities,
+and Siberia, Poland, and the Caucasus (where the procedure is somewhat
+different). The larger cities—St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, and
+Riga—vote according to property qualification, and elect members
+directly to the Duma.
+
+The result of this complicated system of suffrage is that the landed
+interest and the wealthier classes are predominant in the Duma, and
+consequently the Conservative element is the strongest.
+
+The Radical, Social Democratic, and Labour element which exists in the
+Duma is furnished by the big towns, with their direct elective system,
+and the election of members representing the peasant class, which is
+always guaranteed—and the artisan class, which is to some extent
+guaranteed—by the elective assemblies of every government.
+
+All that I have written so far concerns the instruments of legislation.
+The administration of the country, the actual business of government, is
+carried out by the Senate, the Council of Ministers, the governors of
+the provinces, the Zemstvos (county councils), and, as far as religious
+affairs are concerned, by the Holy Synod. The highest administrative
+institution of the State is the Senate. The Ruling Senate was founded by
+Peter the Great in 1711, with the object of representing him and acting
+on his behalf during his frequent absences. Its functions, which are
+essentially the same to-day as they were then, only on a larger scale,
+consist in supervising all branches of administration and in seeing that
+the laws are carried out throughout the country. The Ruling Senate, at
+the same time, is the high court of justice for the empire, the highest
+court of appeal in administrative matters, and exercises supreme
+control; it promulgates all laws, and supervises the courts of law.
+
+The Senate has several sub-departments, which have various functions,
+the most important of which is that of checking the executive power,
+and seeing that it is exercised in accordance with the law. The
+department to which this function belongs is also charged with the
+promulgation of a law, and may refuse to promulgate it if the law is
+contrary to the fundamental laws. A procurator, representing the
+Crown, is attached to every department of the Senate, who is
+subordinate to the Minister of Justice. The latter, in this
+connection, is called the Procurator-General.
+
+The Senate also examines complaints brought against Ministers,
+governors, or provincial and district officials. The senators are
+appointed by the Emperor.
+
+The Council of Ministers consists of the Ministers and heads of
+administration.
+
+There are twelve Ministries: Foreign Affairs, War, Admiralty, Finance,
+Education, Ways and Communications, Agriculture, Justice, Commerce and
+Industry, the Imperial Court, the Interior, and the Department of
+Government Control.
+
+Each individual Minister is bound to bring before the Council all Bills
+that are destined to come before the Duma and the Council of Empire; all
+proposals concerning changes in the staff in the chief offices of higher
+and local administration; and all reports which have been drawn up for
+presentation to the Sovereign.[7]
+
+Russia is divided for purposes of administration into provinces called
+governments. Peter the Great was the first Russian ruler to make such a
+division. He divided the country into eight governments. Catherine II.
+increased the number to 40. At the present day there are 78
+governments—49 in European Russia, 10 in Poland, 8 in Finland, 7 in the
+Caucasus, 4 in Siberia.
+
+There are besides these governments, twenty-three provinces which are
+called territories (_oblasti_), which are either incompletely organized
+or retain special institutions. They are for the greater part situated
+at the extremes of the empire. The average size of a government is
+greater than Belgium, Holland, or Switzerland. The divisions were made
+artificially and arbitrarily, and the governments in this respect
+resemble the French departments.
+
+The governments are divided into districts, which correspond to the
+French _arrondissements_. Each province has from eight to fifteen
+districts, and is parcelled out for administrative and judicial
+purposes, according to its size, between a certain number of officials
+called _zemskie nachalniki_, called by some English writers land
+captains. These _zemskie nachalniki_ were created in 1889[8] to replace
+the local justices of peace, who were abolished in that year. They were
+a kind of official squire. The office could in principle only be held by
+a member of the hereditary nobility. They exercise executive and
+judicial authority over the villages in their area of jurisdiction. I
+will discuss their judicial authority later in the chapter on justice.
+They have the character of police officers in that they make bye-laws,
+and that of magistrates in that they decide on their infringement. They
+are nominated by the governor, and appointed by the Minister of the
+Interior. They have the control of the peasants’ communal institutions.
+All resolutions of the village assemblies and findings of the canton
+courts are submitted to them. All the officials of the peasants’
+administration are subordinate to them. They have now become, more or
+less, officials of the Ministry, and are no longer men of weight or
+position among the nobility. The total number of these _zemskie
+nachalniki_ in every district form a Board which sits in the district
+town once or more every month, as necessity arises. This board is
+presided over by the marshal of the nobility of the district, and with
+the co-operation of a police official called the _Ispravnik_, who has
+charge of the police duties of every district, and of other officials,
+constitutes an administrative unit which corresponds to a French
+_sous-préfet_.
+
+At the head of every province is a governor, who is proposed by the
+Minister of the Interior, and appointed by the emperor. He is
+responsible for the administration of the government. His office is not
+unlike that of the intendant of the old _régime_ in France, and the
+préfet of modern France. Formerly the governor concentrated all the
+administrative powers in himself, and every province was a miniature
+autocracy. The governor is assisted by a board of Administration, over
+which he presides, and which consists of a vice-governor, councillors,
+the government medical officer, the government engineer, the architect,
+the land surveyor, and their deputies.
+
+The governor can issue special regulations for safeguarding public
+order; he exercises control over all the administrative offices and
+institutions, all officials and public servants, and the institutions of
+local government. All regulations passed by the county or district
+councils, or the town corporations, must be confirmed by him; and
+likewise the election of all officials elected and appointed by the
+local self-governing bodies.
+
+The principal check on the apparently unlimited powers of the central
+administration, personified in the various governors, lies in the rights
+exercised by the Assembly of Nobles.
+
+The nobility in every district meet once every three years and elect a
+president for their district, who is called the marshal of the nobility
+of the district.
+
+After this is done, all the nobility of all the districts in the
+province unite to elect a president for the province. He is called the
+marshal of the nobility of the province. The election of the marshal of
+the district must be confirmed by the governor; that of the marshal of
+the province is confirmed by the Emperor in person, and by the Emperor
+alone.
+
+In order to belong to the Assembly of Nobles, it is necessary, besides
+being a noble by birth, to own land in the district or the province; to
+possess either a military or civil _tchin_; or in default of this sign
+of rank, certificates testifying that you have passed certain
+examinations.
+
+The right to assemble and elect marshals for the districts and the
+province (and a board of trustees for the orphans of nobles) is all that
+remains now of the larger privileges conferred on the nobility by
+Catherine II. Those privileges consisted in the right of appointing the
+local judges and the chief local officials—that is to say, the county
+police. This prerogative lasted until the epoch of the great reforms in
+the ’sixties.
+
+But in spite of the loss of their former privileges, the nobility, as
+represented in the marshals of the districts, still discharges manifold
+duties of an intricate character, and by so doing forms the corner-stone
+of local administration, and consequently constitutes a certain check on
+the otherwise uncontrolled action of the governor of the province.
+
+As far as administration is concerned, the marshal of the province is
+less important than the marshal of the district. He is an _ex officio_
+member of the governor’s board of administration, and as such, both by
+tradition and by right, he exercises considerable influence, since an
+independent influential personality is certain to be elected to the
+post.
+
+On the other hand, the duties and powers of the marshal of the district
+are more numerous, and stand in closer touch with the machinery of
+provincial administration. He is the president of all the executive
+committees in the district: all committees that deal with the settlement
+of questions relating to the peasants’ land, military conscription, and
+the supervision of local schools. He is the president of the district
+tribunal (the court of petty sessions), and as such the chief justice of
+peace of the district. He is, moreover, the _ex officio_ president of
+the Zemstvo Assembly.
+
+The marshal of the district has duties and capacities of a dual nature.
+On the one hand he performs representative duties resembling those of a
+lord-lieutenant of an English county; and on the other hand, in
+conjunction with the board of _zemskie nachalniki_ I mentioned just now,
+he fills the place of a French _sous-préfet_. But the important fact
+about his position is that he is outside and not inside the central
+official administration. His position is inviolable because once he is
+elected he is irremovable, save by imperial ukase, except in the case of
+his falling under sentence for breaking the law.
+
+The strength of his position lies less in his executive power than in
+the fact that he is an independent unit, acting in the machinery of
+administration, but outside bureaucratic control, and consequently a
+check on the local central administration. He receives no salary, and is
+necessarily a man of social position.
+
+Lately, owing to the reactionary tendency towards centralization which
+followed the revolutionary movement in Russia, and which has not yet
+abated, the influence of the district marshal has been, to a certain
+extent, impaired, owing to the greater influence exercised by the
+police, who make capital, and lead the central administration to make
+capital, out of the fear of revolution.
+
+Besides the Assembly of Nobles there is a further check on the action of
+the provincial governor in the office of the procurator. This office is
+attached to the divisional courts of justice. And the procurator,
+besides acting as public prosecutor and exercising general control over
+law courts, has to see that the law is executed. If a governor acts
+illegally, the procurator has the right to appeal to the Senate, which
+we have already seen fulfils the special duty of examining such
+complaints.
+
+Side by side with the Assemblies of the Nobles there exist assemblies of
+representatives of different classes.
+
+For the purpose of local self-government European Russia is divided into
+village communes, and into groups of communes which form an
+administrative unit, called the Canton (_Volost_). The Canton varies in
+size, and can include as many as thirty villages. Both the Commune and
+the Canton are self-governing. The village is governed by the
+Commune—that is to say, the village assembly—which manages the property
+of the village and divides it among its members, exercises disciplinary
+rights, and has the control of leases of land made to outsiders. But
+both as regards the affairs of the Commune and the Canton, the peasants
+are, as a class, isolated. The Commune and the Canton can only levy
+taxes on their own members.
+
+The Canton has an assembly also. Each Commune sends one man from every
+ten households to the Assembly of the Canton, which elects a president
+called the Elder, and five judges chosen from the peasants to serve on
+the court of the Canton.
+
+The provincial administration is, to some extent, entrusted to elective
+District and Provincial Assemblies called Zemstvos.
+
+The Zemstvo was created in 1864. The word _Zemstvo_ means territorial
+assembly; the institution corresponds to our county council. There are
+two kinds of Zemstvo, the smaller being elected to deal with the affairs
+of a single district; the larger is selected by the Zemstvos of all the
+districts, and forms a county council for the whole province to deal
+with the affairs common to all the districts in that province.
+
+Both the assemblies must be summoned at least once a year. (They sit for
+about a fortnight.)
+
+The District Zemstvo Assembly is elected indirectly, and consists on an
+average of about forty members. The elections of the District Zemstvo
+are organized according to class division, or rather civic status. Each
+class elects so many representatives—the peasants so many, the nobility
+so many, the town dwellers so many. The number of the representatives of
+each class is fixed by law in such way as to give the representatives of
+the nobility the preponderance. Thus about half (or more than half) the
+members consists of members of the nobility; the remainder are peasants,
+and include three or four merchants from the towns. All members are
+elected for a term of three years.[9]
+
+The Provincial Zemstvo consists chiefly of members of the nobility,
+elected from the District Assemblies.[10]
+
+Both the assemblies elect from amongst themselves a standing committee
+(_zemskaya uprava_) of four or five paid officials, which is appointed
+for three or four years. These standing committees do practically all
+the current work of the district.
+
+The governor of the province has the right to confirm or to refuse to
+confirm the election of the presidents and members of the Zemstvo
+Assemblies; to institute legal proceedings against them; to exercise a
+veto on all resolutions of both bodies. The assemblies have the right of
+appeal to the Senate.
+
+The nature of self-government in the towns, and the control exercised
+over it is practically the same as that of the Zemstvo institutions.
+(The property qualification for the elector is high.)
+
+The importance of the Zemstvo institutions lies in the fact that they
+minister to the practical needs of the community. Within their scope are
+the ways and communications, the roads, and the Zemstvo post, all
+medical and charitable institutions, mutual insurance, prevention of
+cattle disease, fire brigades, primary education, and the development of
+agriculture and trade.
+
+The practical weakness of the Zemstvo as an institution is that it
+possesses no lower elective unit corresponding to a vestry or a parish;
+no boards below those of the district, which execute its decisions.
+
+The resources of the Zemstvo consist in taxes, which are levied by the
+District and Provincial Zemstvo on land, whether owned by the peasants,
+the nobility, or the Crown.
+
+The main characteristic of the Provincial Zemstvo (since it was
+remodelled in 1890, before which date it was more democratic) is that it
+is extremely reactionary. But the Zemstvo consists, as I have already
+said, chiefly of the nobility—that is to say, of members of the more
+cultivated classes—and the result of this is, that in spite of its
+members being reactionary in views and sentiment, the work done by
+assemblies of these reactionary members is, except in times of violent
+reaction, such as the period immediately following after the
+revolutionary movement, of a progressive nature.
+
+In looking back on the work that the Zemstvo has accomplished during the
+last fifty years, one sees clearly that the action of the Zemstvo has
+been purely progressive, and the work done has outstripped in liberalism
+the views and the opinions of the nobility taken as a class, which
+constitute its most important ingredient. This explains the mistrust
+which the central administration entertains towards the Zemstvo—even
+towards its reactionary members. The representatives of the central
+administration, by exercising their right of confirming or cancelling
+elections and resolutions, are for ever trying to hinder and hamper the
+work of the Zemstvo, and to acquire greater control over it.
+
+In a matter such as the Zemstvo it must by no means be assumed that the
+various Ministries in St. Petersburg are necessarily at one. On the
+contrary, they may be, and they often are, at sixes and sevens. For
+instance, the Ministry of Agriculture is really (and ever since it has
+existed always has been) progressive; and since it wishes to get things
+done, works with the Zemstvo; and so does the Ministry of Finance, as
+far as it is concerned with the Zemstvo. This guarantees a certain
+counter influence to that of the Ministry of the Interior, which carries
+on the traditional policy of its department, of regarding the Zemstvo as
+an enemy.
+
+If we look now at the work which is being accomplished by the Zemstvo in
+the various branches which come under its scope, we see a considerable
+improvement in medical institutions and in all that regards public
+health; a vast improvement in primary education, the progress being
+lately so great that there has been a demand for supplementary funds for
+education; and quite lately agriculture has taken a sharp bound forward,
+and in so doing has received considerable assistance from the State.
+
+Taking the Zemstvo and its work as a whole, as a factor in Russian life
+and administration, it is clear that it is the one real and vital
+political force in Russia, in spite of the reactionary tendencies of the
+majority of its members, and in spite of an important organic weakness
+in its constitution, which I have already mentioned—namely, the absence
+of a link between the Zemstvo and the people it represents.
+
+It is near to practical life, and it is nearer to the population than
+any other institution or body, and since it possesses, in its limited
+way, wider facilities for the public discussion of vital interests than
+any other institutions, it has during the last fifty years proved the
+real organ of public opinion, and the real lever in the matter of
+progress, for it was the Zemstvo which voiced the universal desire for
+reform in 1905, and contributed in no small way to the changes which
+were then made.
+
+All that is here set down, when you read it through, sounds, as far as
+the Zemstvo is concerned, as if all were for the best in the best of all
+possible worlds; but in practice the work of the Zemstvo is hampered by
+the power of the officials appointed by the Central Government, and the
+power of these officials is not only used arbitrarily, but sometimes in
+a manner definitely contrary to the law. For the governor of the
+province, if he cannot absolutely put a stop to the work of the Zemstvo,
+can hamper it in every possible way, and put effectual spokes in its
+wheels. It is not only that the possibility of his so doing exists, but
+the fact is being actually and not seldom experienced at the present
+time, owing to the low administrative standard of the governors who are
+appointed.
+
+It is worth mentioning also that in the important outlying districts of
+Russia—in Poland, the Baltic provinces and the Caucasus—there is no
+Zemstvo, and all the duties of the Zemstvo are carried out by a
+committee of officials, and the majority of these do their work
+extremely badly. Also, in these regions the nobility have no rights.
+
+If you review the Government machine which administrates Russia as a
+whole, the same criticism applies. On paper the fundamental laws of the
+empire, the rights of the two Houses and of the Senate, and of the
+instruments of local self-government, together with the numerous checks
+and safeguards against official lawlessness, seem to provide a very fine
+working constitution. In practice the rights are often overruled, and
+the checks disregarded.
+
+The Duma, by its very existence, of course, is an element of progress,
+however indirect; but here again the Government, owing to the nature of
+the electoral law, can exert pressure on the elections, and have so far
+succeeded in always obtaining a reactionary majority, so that the actual
+composition of the Duma is not what it would be if the Government
+exerted no pressure at all.
+
+Again, since any form or shade of constitutional government is a new
+feature in Russia, in many cases that arise there is no established
+precedent which can be referred to, and the course to be taken is
+doubtful, but in such cases the benefit of this doubt accrues to the
+Government.
+
+In spite of this there is not the slightest doubt that in Russia at
+present the existence and the action of the Duma are felt, indirectly,
+very widely indeed. And as a rule people who are in the thick of Russian
+affairs, the Russians themselves, will not realize this so well as an
+outsider.
+
+The existence of the Duma has proved a factor in national progress. And
+the outsider, who has had any experience of Russian life in the past,
+will at once see that the progress in the general state of affairs from
+what existed ten years ago to what exists now has been immense. There is
+a great gulf between the period before 1905 and the era which began in
+1905. The trouble is that the government and the administration have not
+kept step and time with the national progress. And when people say in
+exculpation of the faults of any given government, that every country
+has the government which it deserves, it may safely be said that the
+actual government of Russia is less good than what Russia deserves,
+since it is impossible to deny that, in some respects, Russia is
+comparatively, relatively, and taking the general state of affairs and
+of national progress into consideration, less well governed at
+present—as is the case probably with England and most other European
+countries—than it was not only in the immediate past, but even in the
+days of Alexander II. Hence there exists an increasing political
+discontent, into the specific causes of which we will inquire in the
+next chapter.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V.
+                         CAUSES OF DISCONTENT.
+
+
+I have already said in the preceding chapter that the principles of
+central and parliamentary government in Russia, and the theory of local
+administration and local self-government, if investigated on paper,
+produce an excellent impression, so that the casual inquirer, glancing
+at the subject for the first time, will be tempted to exclaim, “What
+more can the Russian people want?”
+
+Moreover, there has perhaps never been a period when Russia was more
+materially prosperous than at the present moment, or when the great
+majority of the people seemed to have so little obvious cause for
+discontent; and yet—it would be futile to deny it—unmistakable signs of
+discontent exist.
+
+Seeds of discontent have been sown, and are every day being sown
+broadcast, and unless their early shoots are uprooted in time, it is
+difficult to imagine that they will not bear momentous fruit in the
+future, however distant such a future may be.
+
+Whereupon the casual inquirer would probably ask a further question: “If
+the Russian people are discontented, why are they discontented? What are
+these seeds of discontent? Whence do they come? And are their grievances
+substantial or frivolous, real or imaginary?”
+
+The answer is, I think, simple.
+
+The seeds of discontent, where they exist, are the result of one simple
+fact. In 1905 explicit promises were made to the Russian people, which,
+if carried out, would insure their complete political liberty and the
+full rights of citizenship. Those promises have in some cases not been
+carried out at all, and in other cases they have only been carried out
+partially, or according to the letter and not according to the spirit.
+
+Practically, political liberty does not yet exist in Russia, and the
+rights of political citizenship are still a vain dream.
+
+Every now and then the spokesmen of the Government inform us that the
+Russian people are quite indifferent as to legislative reform, and that
+all they care for is competent administration. I think, however, putting
+aside altogether the question whether competent administration can be
+obtained without legislative reform, that nobody will deny that some
+people in Russia want political liberty. It would be equally difficult
+to deny that the absence of political liberty indirectly hampers and
+annoys and exasperates a still greater number of people, who take no
+interest in politics and who foster no political theories of any kind.
+
+Hence discontent arises, which will necessarily vary and increase in
+proportion as such annoyance and exasperation is felt by a greater or
+lesser number of people.
+
+In the years that followed immediately on the publishing of the
+Manifesto in 1905, the policy of the Government during the
+administration of P. A. Stolypin was: “Order first; Reform afterwards.”
+To P. A. Stolypin fell the ungrateful task of restoring order. He
+accomplished his task, successfully if drastically. And it is only fair
+to say that it would have probably been impossible to restore order save
+by drastic measures. It must also be said in fairness that P. A.
+Stolypin initiated certain large measures which tend towards reform—his
+Land Bill and his Education Bill, for instance. But the reforms
+initiated during his administration, and during that of his successor,
+have as yet only been partial; and so far the practical policy of the
+Government has consisted in taking away, curtailing, and limiting with
+one hand what has been given with the other.
+
+This is partly due to the constant introduction of qualifying clauses
+and amendments in any new laws that are liberal in spirit—amendments
+which have the effect of hindering the practical operation of the laws;
+and partly to the quality of the local administration, whose duty it is
+to interpret and to execute the laws. As a general rule, the local
+administrative officials, by the manner of their interpretation, are
+completely successful in sacrificing the spirit to the letter of the
+law, and of depriving the laws of their true meaning, and of rendering
+them null and void in practice.
+
+Such a policy must inevitably have an exasperating effect on the
+population.
+
+Let us look into the matter a little more closely.
+
+The Manifesto of October 30 promised, firstly, the creation of a
+deliberative and legislative assembly without whose consent no new laws
+in the future should be passed; and secondly, the full rights of
+citizenship—namely, the inviolability of the person, freedom of
+conscience, freedom of the Press, the right of organizing public
+meetings, and of founding unions and associations.
+
+How far and in what manner have these promises been fulfilled? How far
+are these things a practical factor in Russian political life to-day?
+
+Let us take the Duma first.
+
+We have already seen that the Duma possesses a considerable indirect
+influence, and that by its very existence, and quite apart from what it
+may effect or fail to effect legislatively, a change has come about in
+the government of Russia; but in spite of this, the powers, or rather
+the power, of the Duma is to a certain extent paralyzed by the attitude
+of the Central Government towards it.
+
+The attitude of the Government towards the Duma is a curious one.
+Firstly, by its interpretation of the law, by the addition of qualifying
+clauses and amendments, the Government tries, whenever it can, to
+diminish the powers that have been granted to the Duma, and more
+especially in so far as they concern the Budget; and secondly, the
+Government floods the Duma with a great quantity of irrelevant and
+trivial legislation with the object of keeping the more vital and
+important issues out of its reach.
+
+This is one reason why any prevailing discontent is prevented from
+subsiding, since by acting in this manner the Government never ceases to
+fan the smouldering ashes of discontent into flame, and to feed the
+flame with slender but continuous supplies of fresh fuel.
+
+So far, then, we have already one cause of discontent—the attitude of
+the Government towards the Duma; and this attitude consists, in a word,
+of doing everything it can to prevent the Duma from becoming a reality—a
+vital factor in the State—and in trying to convert it into a passive
+annex to the Government machine.
+
+The second question now arises. What has been, and what is, the attitude
+of the Central Government towards the remaining promises made by the
+Manifesto of October 30th? I will take the promises separately; but
+before doing so, it will be as well to point out that, at present, all
+matters which are affected by the promises laid down in the Manifesto of
+1905 are being carried out by temporary regulations, instead of by laws
+passed through the Duma. It is clear that temporary regulations lend
+themselves easily to amendment, and amendments signify a deviation from
+the original intention of such regulations. Moreover, all temporary
+regulations are interpreted by the local officials, whose powers of
+interpretation are necessarily arbitrary, and whose powers of evasion,
+explanation, and general tergiversation are incredibly ingenious, and
+are almost invariably employed in the interests of reaction. I will now
+take the various points in order.
+
+(1.) _The Inviolability of the Person._—With regard to this question,
+practically nothing has been done. A Bill on the subject was introduced
+by the Government during the third session of the last Duma, but was
+rejected by the Duma because it did not affect the root of the question.
+Another Bill was introduced later, but has not yet emerged into the
+region of fact. The laws of the country on this point are brief and
+explicit. They guarantee to the subject a slightly protracted form of
+_habeas corpus_, and are summed up in twelve short clauses; but if you
+buy the book containing these twelve short clauses, you find they are
+followed by a whole volume of amendments, explanations, and rules
+relating to exceptional circumstances. Practically, these exceptions
+deal for the greater part with so-called political offences; but owing
+to the ramifications of these manifold amendments, both the central and
+the local authorities can enlarge their conception of what constitutes a
+political offence to almost any extent. The interpretation becomes
+infinitely elastic; and thus it is easy for people who have no more to
+do with politics than the man in the moon to fall under the suspicion of
+a political offence, and the life of everyday people is reached and
+touched by the ramifications of exceptional clauses made to a clear law,
+which was originally passed in order to deal with cases germane to one
+exceptional matter, and which could only therefore affect a small
+minority.
+
+Again, all the ordinary laws of the country can be suspended and
+overruled by the putting into force of temporary regulations, which are
+introduced by the authorities as administrative measures in districts
+which are, or are supposed to be, disturbed.
+
+These temporary measures are in reality minor forms and shades of
+martial law. They consist of what are called the state of “Reinforced
+Protection,” and the state of “Extraordinary Protection.”
+
+Both these exception “states” may be proclaimed by the Ministry of the
+Interior, after a resolution of the Cabinet Council, which must be
+confirmed by the Emperor.
+
+Under the state of “Reinforced Protection,” governors-general,
+governors, and city prefects have the right of inflicting punishment for
+the infringement of any rules they may issue by a fine not exceeding 500
+roubles (£50), or by a term of imprisonment not exceeding three months,
+without trial. They have also, among other things, the right of
+prohibiting public or private meetings, of shutting commercial
+establishments, of prohibiting the residence of any person in a given
+district.
+
+Under the state of “Extraordinary Protection” their powers are enlarged.
+For instance, a special police can be created, and certain offences can
+be removed from the jurisdiction of ordinary courts of law and can be
+tried by courts-martial; newspapers and periodicals can be suspended,
+and schools can be closed for a period not exceeding one month. The
+state of “Reinforced Protection” is still in force at this moment in
+many parts of Russia, and although one reads from time to time in the
+newspaper that it has been removed from such and such a place, it often
+happens that it is merely the name which has been abolished. The
+governor will often continue to exercise rights which are supposed to
+apply solely to exceptional circumstances.
+
+Further, these “States of Protection” are often left in force in places
+where there is not, and has not been for a reasonable time, a shadow of
+disturbance.
+
+(2.) _Freedom of Conscience._—A law whose sole object was religious
+tolerance was passed a few years ago. Theoretically freedom of
+conscience is supposed to exist. Practically, it exists only very
+partially. If there are fifty members of any religious denomination in
+any place in Russia, they are supposed to be allowed to build a church,
+where they can worship as they please. But there is a clause in this law
+forbidding propaganda; and lately the interpretation of this clause has
+become more and more elastic, and in virtue of it technical objections
+are raised showing that Catholic or Uniate, or other unorthodox
+societies, are not in order, and their churches are consequently closed.
+Sometimes technical objections of another nature are found to meet the
+case. A case in point is that of the Catholic Uniates who were allowed
+by P. A. Stolypin to have a church in St. Petersburg. That church has
+now been closed by the Minister of the Interior, Maklakov, on the
+grounds that the church building does not fulfil the technical
+conditions obligatory to buildings where public meetings are held.
+Nothing could be more typical. The tendency during the last three years
+has been to take away by means of technical objections, or under the
+pretence of having discovered traces of propaganda, the larger liberties
+that were given. And this again irritates all those whom it may concern.
+As soon as any religious sect is suspected of opening rivalry to the
+Orthodox Church, some means or other is immediately found for
+prohibiting it. The Salvation Army are not allowed in Russia. Such
+things being the case, it would be absurd to say that liberty of
+conscience exists in Russia; on the other hand, it exists in larger
+measure than it used to.
+
+(3.) _Freedom of the Press._—Broadly speaking, the Press is free in
+Russia at present, and this is perhaps the greatest asset which resulted
+from the revolutionary movement. Before 1905, there existed what in
+practice, although not in theory, was called “Previous Censure”—that is
+to say, representatives of the censorship used to visit the newspaper
+offices and censor the newspapers at their own sweet will. At present
+people can write what they choose in the newspapers, but the
+administration has the right to inflict a fine not exceeding 500 roubles
+(£50) on a newspaper (_a_) for publishing false news concerning the
+Government; and (_b_) for inciting the populace to rise against the
+Government; and in the case of “Extraordinary Protection,” newspapers,
+as we have seen, can be stopped altogether.
+
+The effect of this regulation is felt far more in the provinces than in
+the large cities, for it stands to reason that a small newspaper with a
+narrow circulation will be more sensitive to such a fine than a large
+newspaper with an enormous circulation, to which it will be no more than
+a flea-bite. Moreover, the regulation is applied more often and more
+indiscriminately in the provinces than in the large cities.
+
+For instance, the Moscow newspaper, the _Russkoe Slovo_, which I believe
+has the largest circulation of any Russian newspaper, published on
+November 7, 1913, the following schedule of the fines imposed on
+newspapers for comments on the Beiliss trial up to date:—
+
+                   _October 24 (November 7, N.S.)._
+     Pamphlets confiscated                                       1
+     Newspapers fined                                            1
+     Total fines, 200 roubles (about £20).
+
+               _Total for 30 days of the Beiliss Case._
+     Editors arrested                                            6
+     Editors summoned                                            6
+     Newspapers confiscated                                     27
+     Pamphlets confiscated                                       6
+     Newspapers closed                                           3
+     Newspapers fined                                           42
+     Total of fines (up to date) 12,750 roubles (about £1,275).
+
+A similar schedule, with its daily total of fines, appeared every day
+during the ritual murder trial.
+
+It will be seen that the fines, when added up, do not amount to a very
+considerable sum, but a succession of such fines, not large in
+themselves, can end by doing damage to a small provincial paper. In any
+case they exercise an irritating effect.
+
+Here again the question of interpretation plays an important part.
+
+Almost anything can be interpreted as coming under the head of “false
+news concerning the Government,” and it is often easy to catch a
+newspaper out of a technical inaccuracy, although the statement made may
+in its substance be true.
+
+For instance, if in a schedule such as that I have quoted it were stated
+that the editor of such and such a provincial newspaper had been
+arrested, and supposing the fact were true; but supposing also he had
+been subsequently released, and the news of his release had not reached
+the newspaper which published the news of his arrest, the newspaper
+would be fined for spreading false news with regard to the action of the
+Government.
+
+Supposing, again, a regulation in a provincial district had been
+infringed by an official, and the news of the infringement were
+published in a newspaper; if the newspaper made a mistake with regard to
+the exact rank of the official in question, it would be fined for
+spreading false news.
+
+Newspapers that copy news from other newspapers which come under the ban
+of “false news” are likewise liable to be fined.
+
+This state of things, although it leaves the richer newspapers
+indifferent, exasperates the great mass of the journalistic world beyond
+measure.
+
+(4.) _The right of holding Public Meetings._—Public meetings are
+allowed, theoretically, under certain conditions. In the first place, in
+order to hold a meeting you must apply for permission to the local
+governor, and state the object of the meeting. If the local governor
+refuses, you must give up the idea.
+
+Secondly, a member of the police must be present at any meeting, who
+shall have the right of putting a stop to the proceedings if he thinks
+the speakers are showing signs of an anti-governmental tendency.
+
+The police have in the last few years continually enlarged their
+conception of what can be considered anti-governmental, so much so that
+they often go to a meeting with the sole purpose of stopping it, and
+seize the first pretext of so doing, especially if it is a meeting of
+working men. The net result of the policy is that public meetings are
+rare, even at election times. Even the programmes of concerts must be
+sanctioned by the police.
+
+(5.) _Associations and Societies._—These had a brief and flourishing
+existence immediately after the publication of the Manifesto, during the
+administration of Count Witte and the session of the first Duma; since
+then they have practically ceased to exist. They are entirely subject to
+Government control, and have been controlled out of all existence.
+
+These five clauses which I have just analyzed, if they were carried out
+in practice, would confer on the Russian citizen complete rights of
+citizenship—in a word, political liberty. As it is, they are either not
+carried out at all, or in so far as they are carried out they operate in
+virtue of temporary regulations which are (_a_) liable to constant
+amendment; (_b_) at the mercy of the interpretation of local officials.
+
+So, if the attitude of the Government towards the Duma is one great
+cause of discontent, the nature and the tendency of local administration
+is another.
+
+The local administration is bad in itself, and has the effect of
+exasperating the people.
+
+One of the reasons why this is so, is the necessity which the local
+officials feel themselves to be under of keeping up their prestige, and
+the prestige of the Central Government. The result of the policy of
+“Order first; Reform afterwards,” as it filtered through the various
+branches of administration throughout the country, is that the greatest
+crime in the eyes of the administration is criticism—criticism of any
+kind—because the slightest breath of criticism is held to be subversive
+and detrimental to the prestige of Government; and in the eyes of the
+officials, the Government must be upheld at all costs.
+
+In the country, in the provinces and districts, at the present day in
+Russia, the illegality practised by Government officials is more
+flagrant than it was before 1905, because before 1905 illegality came
+from above, and from above only, and the local Government officials did
+not dare to infringe their obligations, but now the illegality is
+decentralized, and disseminated throughout the complicated network of
+administration. And since any kind of criticism is looked upon as a
+crime, those who are guilty of it, or are suspected of being guilty of
+it, are liable to meet with every kind of small restriction, check, and
+annoyance, and hence the life of the people is interfered with, and
+discontent is engendered.
+
+Nowhere is this clearer than in the part played by the secret police.
+
+We have said that criticism is regarded as a crime, and as an attack on
+the prestige of Government, but the reason of this is that criticism of
+governmental methods or officials is regarded as being synonymous with
+sympathy with the revolutionaries, and the ideas of the extreme parties,
+and this wide definition of criticism includes religious propaganda, the
+spreading of false news, and all anti-governmental speech or action. All
+these things are regarded as denoting sympathy with revolution, and
+revolution in its extreme form.
+
+This is the view of the administration as a whole, and the view is
+strongly reflected in the action of the secret police, which exists all
+over the country; and the business of the secret police is, if not to
+spread discontent, to make it appear far more formidable than it is; to
+make it appear active where in reality it is only passive, otherwise
+there would be no reason why a large part of the secret police should
+exist at all.
+
+In order to check and keep an eye on the revolutionary movement, whose
+existence the administration suspects everywhere, a wholesale system of
+espionage, of secret reports, of private denunciation, exists. The
+administration employs a quantity of people who are paid to “sneak” of
+what is going on in various quarters. Now the step from the office of
+spy to that of _agent provocateur_ is an easy one. It is obvious that a
+spy who wishes for further information about people who are thought to
+be revolutionaries will obtain that information more easily if he
+pretends to be a revolutionary himself. So the spy easily degenerates
+into the _agent provocateur_, and the people, knowing that spies and
+_agents provocateurs_ exist in their midst, feel they are never safe.
+And this feeling that you are never safe, whoever you are, or wherever
+you are (for a report may be at any moment being concocted about you, in
+the very _milieu_ where you live), gives a constantly increasing
+stimulus to discontent. It is not so much the things that happen, but
+the feeling that something may happen, that nobody is safe, which
+prevents discontent from dying out. Here, as in other respects, the life
+of the people is interfered with, and the people are exasperated.
+
+All that I have written so far applies to Russia proper, but it is
+applicable in a higher degree to the Ukraines, to Poland, the Caucasus,
+the Baltic provinces, and to Finland.
+
+In these provinces the arbitrary nature of local administration and the
+illegality practised by Government officials is felt more strongly still
+than in Russia. Consequently, in all these outlying dominions, there
+prevails a greater or a lesser degree of discontent. And this discontent
+is further increased by the policy of the Central Government towards
+these dominions; for the Government _vis-à-vis_ of the Duma makes
+capital out of the question of these different nationalities, and places
+in the foreground questions of legislation which concern them. They are
+used as a political weapon, as a spring-board for nationalist theory and
+practice, and as a means for shelving measures of reform, which deal
+with Russia proper. This not only exasperates these various
+nationalities to a high degree, but it also exasperates those Russians
+who wish to see the reforms that were promised realized in their own
+country.
+
+Finally, the question arises, “Why is this so?” What prevents Russia
+from being quietly governed according to the comprehensive laws that
+already exist in its code, and according to the admirable and
+perspicuous principles of its political constitution? and further, what
+prevents the Government from fulfilling those promises made, which are
+as yet unfulfilled, and from putting into practice reforms which the
+majority of thinking people in Russia agree are indispensable?
+
+It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to give a satisfactory and
+categorical answer to these questions.
+
+Political Liberals in Russia would probably answer that the old _régime_
+which was scotched but not killed in 1905 is gradually recovering
+strength, and is simply fighting for its existence: that it is a case of
+self-preservation. On the other hand, there are Independent
+Conservatives and Independent Radicals who would tell you that what is
+needful in Russia is a strong executive, a drastic and courageous
+dictator, who would be strong enough to hew down the impediments, and
+cart away the rubbish, and govern Russia according to its ancient
+traditions; that this is the only form of government which has ever been
+successful in Russia, but that no such man of action is forthcoming at
+present. Others, more sceptically inclined, would probably remind you
+that every country has the government it deserves; and that if political
+liberty in Russia does not exist, it is owing to the fundamental
+tendency of the Russian character towards indiscipline, and that since
+every Russian is more or less undisciplined, it is impossible for them
+to expect that their Government will be anything but arbitrary.
+
+One thing is certain, the drawbacks, the restraint, the impediments, the
+danger of criticism, the checks on free speech, on free worship, and
+other forms of freedom, to which I have alluded, naturally touch the
+educated part of the population more nearly than they do the great
+mass—the majority, the peasants—who at this moment are better off
+economically than they have ever been before; and consequently, even if
+they are discontented, it stands to reason that in the present
+circumstances it would need a powerful stimulus to increase their
+discontent to breaking point.
+
+And what is true about the peasants is true, to a certain extent, about
+the remainder of the population.
+
+The population on the whole are prosperous at the present moment, and
+their grievances are neither sharp nor strong enough, nor sufficiently
+abundant, to make the temperature of their discontent rise to boiling
+point. When the discontent which now exists becomes sufficiently widely
+and deeply felt to stir the average man to sympathy with action, and the
+abnormal man to violent action, then there may be an outbreak, unless it
+be anticipated by timely measures of reform, and the causes of
+discontent be removed.
+
+At present nothing is being done by the Central Government or the local
+administration in this direction. At the present moment the local
+administration is making capital out of the fear of a revolution and a
+revolutionary movement, of whose existence there is little or no
+evidence, and infecting the central administration with this fear. Both
+the local and the central administration are constantly taking steps and
+issuing minor repressive measures to counteract a danger which, in the
+opinion of most people, exists only in the imagination of detectives;
+but if this policy continues, it is more than probable that the
+administrative powers will in time succeed in transforming the danger
+from an imaginary one into a real one, or rather, they will create the
+very danger they are afraid of; and the next revolution in Russia will
+be the offspring of the fears of the administration—of a bogey.
+
+The last revolutionary movement in Russia had a destructive and
+demoralizing effect on the population; it produced a wave of hooliganism
+among the lower classes, and a current of anarchical thought and conduct
+in the educated classes. It also had a demoralizing effect on the minor
+officials and public servants; but whereas in the great majority of the
+uneducated and educated public the balance of equilibrium was
+automatically restored, owing to the necessities of everyday life and a
+natural reaction towards common sense, this demoralization had a more
+lasting effect on the officials, who once having been used to meet
+exceptional circumstances and lawless acts by arbitrary means and
+illegal measures, found it difficult to divest themselves of the habit.
+And the lower the rung of the official ladder the more apparent the
+demoralization becomes.
+
+Now, it is the small officials who are more intimately in touch with the
+population. Consequently the effect of their action is being continually
+felt, and the effect is bad. And until something is done from above to
+remedy this state of things, the smouldering embers of discontent, as I
+have already said, will never have a chance of growing cold, and may
+ultimately burst out in a fire of alarming proportions.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VI.
+                          THE AVERAGE RUSSIAN.
+
+
+The great danger in studying Russian life is to pay so much importance
+to the trees that the wood escapes notice. The temptation to do so where
+Russia is concerned is all the greater owing to the interest of
+individual trees; and by individual trees I mean not only individuals,
+but phases, tendencies, currents of thought, particular types, and
+political parties. Such types, or schools of thought, or political
+groups, although often of great interest in themselves, are rarely
+representative of the average tendency; and yet by foreigners it is
+often taken for granted that they are not only typical of the whole, but
+that nothing else beside them exists.
+
+There was a time when Russia was supposed to consist entirely of
+Nihilists and policemen; at a later period social revolutionaries took
+the part of Nihilists, and the _agent provocateur_ played the chief part
+in the opposing camp, in the general view one obtained from the foreign
+press.
+
+This general view was, of course, founded on fact. At one period
+Nihilists did exist, did conspire, and did blow up.
+
+As for social revolutionaries, they existed in great quantities, and the
+_agents provocateurs_, too, became so numerous that it was scarcely
+worth while to be a social revolutionary. These groups are historically
+and psychologically worthy of careful study, but they were never
+representative of the average Russian, any more than the Fabians or the
+militant suffragettes are representative of the average Englishman and
+Englishwoman.
+
+Then again, you get the interesting types created by the masters of
+literature. You get Dostoievsky’s neurasthenic murderer, Raskolnikov;
+his frigid and calculating political intriguer, Verkhovensky; his
+undisciplined and centrifugal Dimitri Karamazov. You get Turgeniev’s
+intellectual and uncompromising Bazarov; his enthusiastic sponger and
+_génie sans portefeuille_, Rudin; Tolstoy’s Levin, Gorki’s anarchical
+proletarian. And all these characters are each of them more interesting
+than the other, and all of them reveal qualities that are Russian and
+nothing but Russian. But none of them is the average Russian, because
+the man of genius, when he creates a type such as _Lear_ or _Faust_, is
+not endeavouring to portray the average man, but is making a synthesis
+of the human soul; so that every human being can see something of
+himself in the mirror of the poet’s creation. But that creation is
+larger and wider than nature; and so far from being confined to the
+characteristics of the average man, contains within itself all the
+possibilities and capabilities and passions of the human soul—all the
+strings of the instrument, its whole gamut, its complete range of
+expression.
+
+And the creations of a Russian novelist such as Dostoievsky afford us a
+synthesis of the Russian soul, in its profoundest depths, in its sorest
+spots, at its widest extremes, at its highest pitch of rapture or
+despair. The result is that they are no more portraits of the average
+Russian than _Lear_ is a portrait of the average Englishman; and yet
+they are profoundly Russian, just as _Lear_ is profoundly English, and
+_Faust_ is profoundly German—although _Faust_ is hardly a typical
+portrait of the ordinary German bourgeois.
+
+One of the results which the genius of Russian novelists has had on
+foreign opinion is to create a general impression that Russia is a
+country of “inspissated gloom,” because the greater number of the
+Russian novelists and poets deal with tragic themes, and their
+characters are painted in sombre colours.
+
+There is nothing very strange about this. Happy individuals, like happy
+countries, have no history; and if you want to write drama, and
+especially tragic drama, the domestic affairs of _Œdipus Rex_ or
+_Othello_ obviously offer more fruitful material to the dramatist than
+the domestic affairs of Darby and Joan or of Philemon and Baucis. Even
+if the writer’s aim is comedy, he will probably choose themes and
+material which give occasion for merciless satire or extravagant mirth,
+and create characters which on the comic side are as far above or below
+the average as those of the poets on the tragic side. _Falstaff_ is just
+as extraordinary a character as _Hamlet_, and _Sam Weller_ is just as
+exceptional as Napoleon; yet _Sam Weller_, again, is profoundly English.
+
+In Russia, just as in other countries, the cheerful side of life is
+reflected in literature, and the average man plays a part also—only that
+branch of Russian literature is less well known. Gogol, for instance,
+has created innumerable comic types; and Pushkin has, in his
+masterpiece, _Evgenie Oniegin_, drawn a masterly portrait of an average
+type, and more especially in Tatiana he has given us a lifelike portrait
+of the soul of the Russian woman, which is a radiant soul. But Gogol is
+less well known abroad than Turgeniev; and Pushkin’s work being written
+in verse, suffers badly from inadequacy—or, rather, impossibility—of
+translation.
+
+The net result is that the impression the outside reader obtains from
+such Russian literature as is available to him is that Russia is a
+gloomy country, and that the Russian people are steeped in a cloud of
+permanent melancholy. And yet the first thing that strikes you when you
+go to Russia is the cheerfulness[11] of the people and the good humour
+of the average man. Not long ago, _apropos_ of an article on
+Dostoievsky’s _Idiot_, a well-known Russian artist wrote to _The Times_,
+saying that you might just as well judge the English people by _The City
+of Dreadful Night_ as the Russian people by Dostoievsky’s characters.
+The writer of the article explained, in answer, that he was not judging
+the Russian people at all, but only the faith of Dostoievsky. And
+although I think the writer’s purpose was plain, and that he achieved it
+admirably, nevertheless the Russian artist’s complaint, if it did not
+apply to the writer of that article, was a wholesome reminder to the
+public in general that the creations of Dostoievsky are creations of
+genius, and creations of tragic genius profoundly Russian, but dealing
+almost exclusively with the tragic adventures of the soul (which is,
+after all, the business of tragedy), and leaving out its sunnier
+experiences. As the Russian artist pointed out, there is another side to
+the medal of Russian life, and not only a bright side, but an unusually
+bright side—the _svietlaya duscha_, the radiant soul of which the
+Russian poet speaks, whose radiance, in my opinion, is nowhere plainer
+than in Dostoievsky’s novels, in spite of, and sometimes even because
+of, the encircling gloom.
+
+It stands to reason that, if all Russians were as melancholy as they are
+depicted as being in many Russian novels and plays written by men of
+genius, the great majority of the Russian nation would have cut their
+throats a long time ago.
+
+It is evident that there must be a great deal of cheerfulness, humour,
+and joy to counterbalance the gloom, the anguish, and the melancholy
+which is so vividly and so poignantly described by so many Russian
+authors, or else life would not go on.
+
+This is just what is the case. The Russian goes easily to extremes: he
+is not, as a rule, fond of half measures; so that when he is melancholy,
+his melancholy takes an extreme form. He is fond of going the whole hog;
+and if he is inclined to neurasthenia and hysteria, he will give full
+scope to his fancy in that direction: he will be not uninclined to say
+with Baudelaire, “_J’ai cultivé mon hystérie avec jouissance et
+terreur._”
+
+But the average Russian is, perhaps, little more inclined to
+neurasthenia than the average Englishman. The average Russian is well
+educated, cheerful, sociable, intensely gregarious, hospitable,
+talkative, expansive, good-humoured, and good-natured. You hear often in
+Russia the phrase _shirokaya natura_ applied to the Russian
+temperament—a large nature. It means that the Russian temperament is
+generous, unstinted, democratic, and kind. Good-heartedness, and
+sometimes great-heartedness, is the great asset of the average Russian.
+He is the most tolerant of human beings. He is preeminently indulgent,
+and extends to the faults and failings of his neighbours the same
+indulgence which he knows his own faults and failings will receive at
+his neighbour’s hands. His lack of hypocrisy, and the manner in which he
+will speak of his own shortcomings and deficiencies, will sometimes
+strike the foreigner as being the quintessence of cynicism.
+
+One of the most contented Russians I ever met was a man who had got the
+post of assistant ticket-collector on a small railway line. His duty was
+to check the ticket collector. This man had once upon a time been
+enormously rich. He had possessed estates, where he entertained his
+friends on a large scale, and provided them with every kind of amusement
+in the way of sport. Besides this, he had a private theatre of his own
+and a private orchestra. He spent all his money in this way, until there
+was none left, and he was obliged to accept what post he could get. But
+as an insignificant public servant on the railway line he was just as
+cheerful as ever; he said that he had just as much fun. “I used to drink
+champagne,” he explained, “now I drink vodka; the result is the same in
+the long run. I used to have a lot of money. I’ve spent it; money is
+meant to spend. What is the good of keeping or hoarding it? One can’t
+take it with one when one dies.”
+
+This man had a _shirokaya natura_—a large and generous temperament.
+There was no trace of neurasthenia observable in his character.
+Stinginess is a quality which is rare in Russia. Thrift and economy are
+not among those virtues which are commonest there. On the other hand,
+broadness of mind and largeness of heart are virtues which are among the
+commonest.
+
+After Count Tolstoy died a posthumous play of his was published, called
+_The Living Corpse_. The subject of the play was a story that happened
+in real life, taken straight from the newspaper, with the names and the
+_milieu_ changed, and it struck me, when I read it and saw it acted, as
+being typical of Russian life—a story which could only happen in Russia.
+It is perhaps worth while retelling it here, as it throws more light on
+the subject than pages of argument.
+
+The story is as follows. Liza Protasova leaves her husband Feodor, whom
+she had loved, because he is
+
+                    “A little slovenly in dress,
+                    A trifle prone to drunkenness.”
+
+Not a bad man, but weak, extravagant, and given to periodic outbreaks,
+when he spends the night listening to gipsies singing, and drinking
+champagne. You must know Russia to understand what listening to gipsies
+means, and you must be well inoculated with gipsy music before you
+understand the tyrannical spell of it. It is in a lesser degree like
+smoking opium.
+
+Apart from these more or less venial failings, Feodor, as I have said,
+is not a bad man, nor is he even an unfaithful husband. Nevertheless,
+his wife, after one of these periodic outbursts, leaves him and returns
+to her mother, who thoroughly approves of such a course. But no sooner
+has Liza taken this step than she repents herself of it, and she sends
+Feodor a message by one Karenin asking him to come back to her. Karenin
+is an honest prig and a bore. He is also in love with Liza. He executes
+the commission; but Feodor is listening to the gipsies, and especially
+to one of them called Masha, and he refuses to go back.
+
+Weeks go by, and then months. Karenin loves Liza; Liza loves Karenin.
+Masha loves Feodor. Liza’s mother wishes her daughter to be divorced and
+to marry Karenin. An embassy with this proposal is dispatched to Feodor.
+But according to the Russian law in such a case, in order to get a
+divorce when a wife has left her husband because she no longer wishes to
+be his wife, the husband must take the guilt on himself. He must declare
+himself a guilty, unfaithful husband; and if he is not one, he must
+concoct sham evidence to show that he is, and swear to it. This Feodor
+refuses to do, because he is not guilty; he has not been unfaithful. He
+says, “I have been a bad husband, I am a worthless man; but there are
+things which I cannot do, and one of them is quietly to tell the
+necessary lies in order to make this divorce possible.” He seeks another
+solution. He finds a simple one—suicide. But when the revolver is at his
+temple he hesitates, in an agony; and at that moment Masha the gipsy
+intervenes, sees what is happening, and suggests another solution—that
+he should let the world think he had killed himself, and in reality
+escape with her into the limbo of the disclassed, leaving his wife free
+to marry Karenin. He does this. He writes a letter to his wife, saying
+that he is about to kill himself; he leaves his clothes by the river.
+The plan succeeds; by chance a corpse is found. Liza says it is that of
+her husband (and it is no use saying that this is improbable, because it
+all happened). Feodor and Masha disappear, and Karenin marries Liza. All
+is for the best, for them.
+
+Feodor sinks deeper into the mud; and one fine day, when he is telling
+his story to a friend in a squalid tavern, he is overheard by a kind of
+tramp, who, quick to see the possible profit arising out of such a
+situation, suggests to Feodor a scheme of joint blackmail—that they
+should blackmail Liza. Feodor tells him to go to what I see now is
+prettily called “the underground world”; and the tramp, in a rage, calls
+a policeman and gives Feodor in charge for bigamy. But not only is
+Feodor had up for bigamy, but his wife and Karenin also: they are
+charged with conspiracy—if that be the right term—for having been privy
+to the scheme, and for having paid Feodor to get out of the way and to
+become a “living corpse.” The maximum penalty of the law for bigamy is
+exile to Siberia; the minimum what is called “Church contrition.” But in
+any case the second marriage is cancelled, and if Karenin, Feodor, and
+Liza were acquitted of conspiracy, Liza and Feodor would nevertheless be
+bound to resume their interrupted married life. The lawyers do not
+believe a word of the true story as it is told by the witnesses; and
+Feodor, to prevent Liza from being bound to him once more, commits
+suicide in the corridor of the law courts during the trial. That is the
+story, and such are the facts—such as they actually happened in real
+life.
+
+In this story Feodor, both in his faults and in his good qualities, is
+intensely typical of the Russian character.
+
+This story illustrates the melancholy side of Russian life. To convince
+yourself of the cheerful side of the Russian character, you have only to
+look at any regiment of Russian soldiers marching through a street and
+singing as they march. It is the melancholy note of Russian music that
+is best known abroad. But cheerful songs and choruses exist in great
+abundance, and if you listen to the people in villages singing in the
+summer night, it is nearly always a cheerful song that you will hear to
+the accompaniment of the accordion; and often the songs are not only
+cheerful but irresistible in their lilt. The sense of rhythm of some of
+the village singers, and especially of the accompanists, whether they
+play the accordion or the three-stringed guitar, the _balalaika_, is
+sure, masterly, and astounding. The accompanist follows the singer with
+an infinite diversity in unity, and while varying all the time, and
+introducing fantastic changes and daring improvisations, he never loses
+hold of the main trend of the subject, of the fundamental rhythm: he
+varies with invariable law.
+
+Such music is infectious and captivating. It would inspire the lame to
+dance and the dead to walk. It is untiring. It seems to be able to go on
+and on for ever without pause or hesitation, and to reveal a fresh
+energy and to draw a new supply of strength with every new verse.
+
+The average Russian is not only fond of music—he likes noise. Formerly
+in the restaurants there used to be large barrel organs or orchestrons.
+Now in the smarter restaurants there are bands of stringed instruments,
+and in the eating-houses of the poor, gramophones. Indeed, the
+popularity of gramophones in Russia is extraordinary. A love of
+gramophones is surely the sign of a cheerful temperament.
+
+The amusement which the Russian is fondest of when he wants to have a
+really good time is to go and listen to gipsies. The entertainment is
+worth describing, as it is the unique property of Russia, and is the one
+thing you can almost be sure the average Russian will understand, just
+as you will be sure the average Englishman will understand a sporting
+contest or a music-hall comic turn.
+
+Looked at from the outside, as you see it, for instance, on the stage in
+Tolstoy’s play, this is what you see. A private room in a restaurant. It
+is rather dingy. In the corner there is a battered piano, much the worse
+for wear. On the walls, looking-glasses. At one end of the room a plush
+sofa. In front of it a table, champagne bottles, and glasses.
+
+The spectators sit on the sofa. In front of them, occupying the whole of
+the other side of the room, is the chorus of gipsies. The gipsies are
+not raggle-taggle people in shabby and gorgeous clothes. They are a
+chorus of men and women in ordinary dress, who, though swarthy in
+complexion, look like the audience in the upper circle at a Queen’s Hall
+concert.
+
+The gipsies show signs of the boredom and fatigue common to
+professionals engaged in the performance of their professional duties.
+They yawn. One of them has got a toothache and a swollen face. They
+carry on an undercurrent of irrelevant conversation amongst themselves,
+while they automatically sing. The outsider will notice the mechanical
+side of the gaiety and the poetry they are paid to evoke. The candles on
+the table are guttering, and through the windows of the cheerless
+private room the cold dawn pierces, or the bright sun streams, as the
+case may be.
+
+But those who are of the feast, and in it, notice none of these things.
+They are there for glamour, and they have got it. Oblivious of every
+sordid detail, and of all the mechanism, they are aware only of the
+poetry, the romance, and the passion evoked by a wailing concord of
+piercing, discordant sounds which play on the nerves like a bow upon
+strings.
+
+The chorus sit in a semicircle, a man with a guitar stands up and leads
+the chorus, his guitar and his body swaying to the rhythm. A woman takes
+a solo part. The chorus rises into a wail as loud and as fierce as the
+howling of a pack of wolves, and then dies away in an unsatisfied sigh.
+
+The first time you hear this monotonous and exasperating music you may
+think it disagreeable; but the moment you are bitten by the music and
+infected with it, the sensation is rather like this: first you tremble
+all over as with a fever; then you are aware that the fever is pleasant.
+Then you forget all this: you are far away amid white dawns and
+sleepless midnights, and when you are brought back to reality, you
+demand—you insist on—one more glimpse of that sweet and bitter, that
+discordant and melodious, fairyland.
+
+The gipsy music certainly has the quality of growing on you. It
+intoxicates some people. They are bitten by it to such an extent that
+they crave for it, as for a drug. They cannot do without it. Others are
+invincibly bored. But to the average Russian, to go and listen to
+gipsies, when you wish to enjoy yourself especially, is a common custom,
+and an expensive custom, so that, as a rule, people club together when
+they wish to treat themselves to this luxury.
+
+The expense is part of the fun. If the average Russian wants to
+celebrate a feast of any kind he wishes to add to the festivity the
+spice of recklessness which the feeling that he is spending more than he
+can afford will give him. And if on such occasions he falls into the
+spending mood, he will spend recklessly.
+
+He is generous, and, as a rule, careless about money. An enormous amount
+of borrowing is constantly going on. A asks B to lend him a hundred
+roubles. B complies at once, although he hasn’t got it, and borrows it
+from C. Laxity in money matters, which is fairly common, is probably in
+some degree the result of the widespread administrative venality in the
+past, which was in its turn the inevitable fruit of long years of
+unchecked bureaucracy in a large country. At the height of the old
+_régime_ venality was in Russia a natural corrective to the narrowness
+or severity of regulations. Toleration was obtained by bribery. The
+schismatics, or the Jews, or any class which suffered from
+administrative disabilities, got round them by bribery. Again, when you
+have a bureaucracy on a very large scale, a great number of the minor
+public servants cannot possibly live on their wages: they will be
+certain to supplement their insufficient incomes by exacting and
+receiving bribes. Administrative corruption was at one time practically
+universal in Russia. It has received much more than a considerable check
+since the creation of the Duma and the increased liberty of the Press,
+since in the Duma questions can be asked, and transactions can be
+brought to the public notice which in the old days were securely
+screened from all possible investigation or inquiry.
+
+The average Russian was probably not more venal than the average native
+of any other country. Some of the causes of his venality were common to
+the human race, and were such as produce venality in any time and in any
+country; and chief amongst these is the one I have already mentioned—the
+underpayment of the public servant. Another cause of corruption was the
+irresponsibility of officials. Until the Duma was made, public officials
+were, as a rule, immune from the law which in theory laid down severe
+penalties against all abuse of authority and all illegalities committed
+by officials in the performance of their public duties. All this has
+changed in the last ten years, and is changing still; there is
+infinitely less administrative corruption than there was. The average
+middle-aged Russian of to-day was brought up in an atmosphere in which
+the public revenue was regarded as a fair game for exploitation, and
+those who cheated the State, or made money by bribery or any illicit
+means of any kind, were treated with the utmost tolerance.
+
+In spite of this, the average Russian is not one whit more dishonest or
+immoral than his fellow-creatures in neighbouring countries. But if he
+is dishonest, his failing will be far more noticeable than that of the
+dishonest in other countries: firstly, because he will take infinitely
+less pains, or no pains at all, to conceal it; he will not hide it under
+a veneer of hypocrisy—he will wear it on his sleeve; secondly, because
+he is fundamentally good-natured, and his good nature varies from
+heights of Christian charity on the one hand, to depths of complete
+moral laxity on the other. On the one hand you have Dostoievsky’s
+utterly disinterested Mwyskin, and on the other hand Gogol’s completely
+venal Khlestyakov. The average Russian will probably have a dose of both
+qualities.
+
+The average Russian is, above all things, a sociable being, who is fond
+of eating good solid food and drinking vodka, and who is averse to
+strenuous mental or physical exertion. This does not mean that you will
+not find any amount of hard workers in Russia; but I am talking of the
+average man. And it is just the average man, _Monsieur Tout-le-Monde_,
+the man in the street, who is left out of the discussion when people
+think, talk, or write of Russia. The intellectuals are discussed, the
+Nihilists, the Socialists, the revolutionaries, the extreme
+reactionaries, the man of genius, the criminal, the martyr, the hero,
+the scoundrel, the æsthete. But the average Russian is, as a rule,
+neither a hero, a genius, a scoundrel, nor an æsthete. But he is in the
+long run the man who counts. It is with his sanction and co-operation
+alone that any great change has been made in Russian history. At the
+beginning of the Russo-Japanese war, he, the man in the street, was
+mildly in favour of it. After the initial reverses he was angrily in
+favour of it. After several months he was angrily against it, and his
+anger was directed against the Government. So much so, that the
+Government was compelled to take active steps, and to promise tangible
+reform. The climax of the hostility of public opinion happened when the
+whole country went on strike in the autumn of 1905. Then, for one
+moment, the whole of Russia was in agreement, and public opinion was
+consequently irresistible. Later on, when political parties were formed,
+public opinion was no longer at one, and weakness began to set in.
+
+Finally, when the constitutional and peaceable reformers had succeeded
+in effecting nothing beyond the creation of the Duma (which was in
+itself an immense step), and the militant reformers had merely achieved
+a series of sporadic acts of terrorism, one result of which was that the
+whole of the criminal classes followed their example and adopted their
+methods for the purposes of individual hooliganism—the average Russian,
+the man in the street, was alienated from the revolutionary movement,
+and no longer gave it his support. Naturally enough, for his pocket and
+his person were no longer safe. The street became no place for a man. He
+could no longer go for a walk in it without the possibility of having
+his private purse “expropriated.”
+
+Political theory had become a practical fact with a vengeance so far as
+the criminal class were concerned. And the political terrorists had
+taught the impartial burglar the use and convenience of the Browning
+pistol, and had shown him how easy it was to rob a bank by bluff or
+dynamite. And as soon as the man in the street condemned revolutionary
+methods in Russia, the revolutionary movement came to an end. It could
+not live without his inarticulate support, without his active or passive
+sympathy.
+
+And what is the average man doing or thinking now?
+
+The answer to such a question must necessarily depend on the exact
+moment at which it is put. Had it been put in the summer of 1913—in
+July, say—it would have been safe to say in answer to this question, and
+in reviewing public opinion during the last two years, that the average
+Russian was consciously or unconsciously feeling the effects of the
+increased and ever increasing prosperity of the country; that he was
+manifesting indifference both towards internal and foreign politics;
+that he was making and spending money, and falling into a lethargy of
+prosperous materialism. But the autumn of 1913 has already shown how
+rash it would have been to make any such definite statement, without
+qualification, and without leaving a door open upon fresh possibilities.
+
+In spite of the increasing prosperity of the country—in spite of the
+rapid strides that education is making—seeds of discontent, which so far
+from being removed from above have been watered from above, have lately
+been making themselves manifest. And if it is too much—and it is too
+much—to say that the average Russian is as yet affected, it is at all
+events true that a considerable section of the educated, political, and
+commercial community, including many men well known in the political
+world who had hitherto supported the Government, are complaining in no
+uncertain voice of the acts of the administration.
+
+There exist in Russia a great many antiquated and useless things in the
+shape of legislative and hampering regulations which need sweeping away.
+If the local administration of the country were universally excellent
+and competent, the average man would not probably trouble his head about
+them. But the local administration of the country is neither excellent
+nor competent: its acts are often perilously illegal. And it is
+difficult to see how it could be otherwise, until the remains of the old
+_régime_ are swept away from above, and a new _régime_ is inaugurated.
+So far from anything being done in this direction, the old _régime_ is
+being bolstered up; and so far from keeping their promises of reform,
+the central administration has been busy taking away, or limiting, what
+had already been given. The result of this has been that the Government
+has succeeded in exasperating a large part of the educated portion of
+the community. Discontent is being expressed. The Government has
+succeeded in rousing at least one section of the population from the
+lethargy brought on by prosperity; and as soon as this discontent has
+become sufficiently widespread, and sufficiently strong and universal to
+cause the man in the street not only to speak out, but, if not to act,
+at least to sympathize with action, then, unless some timely measures
+are taken from above, it is possible that efforts may be made from below
+to remove the causes of discontent.
+
+In the meantime the man in the street is certainly aware of the
+prevalence of discontent, and in many cases and places he is acutely
+discontented himself. It would be idle to speculate on what proportions
+his discontent will reach, and what its effect will be either in the
+immediate or the remote future. The future will answer this question.
+But ultimately, I think, it is safe to say that the achievement of
+political liberty in Russia will depend not on the dynamite and the
+death of revolutionaries however self-sacrificing and however ardent,
+nor on the measures of a statesman however far-seeing and however wise,
+but on the will and desire of the average man. On the day the average
+man really desires political liberty he will get it. So far, the only
+thing he has desired and obtained is individual liberty—liberty of
+thought, _liberté des mœurs_. In order to obtain political liberty, he
+will no doubt have to sacrifice a portion of the unbounded power he now
+enjoys of doing exactly what he likes in the sphere of personal conduct,
+because political liberty implies personal discipline, or a certain
+amount of personal discipline. Will the average Russian make a
+sacrifice? That depends, perhaps, on what store he will ultimately set
+on political life and political freedom; on how far indifference will
+prevail; and also on the future policy and quality of the local and
+central administration. But in the long run the question as to whether
+any efforts towards obtaining political liberty will be successful or
+not, depends on the generation which is growing up, and which is as yet
+an unknown quantity. But whatever strange and new fruits the coming
+generation may bring forth, one thing is certain—no vital changes will
+come about in Russian life without the conscious or unconscious
+co-operation of the average man.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII.
+                        THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS.
+
+
+In Russia the representatives of the liberal professions—lawyers,
+doctors, professors, literary men, agricultural experts, statists,
+schoolmasters, journalists—are denoted, as a rule, by the generic term
+_intelligentsia_. The term is elastic, and its use, as I know by
+experience, can easily lead to the greatest misunderstandings; the
+reason of this being that the word is sometimes used in a broad sense,
+and sometimes in a narrow sense, and sometimes in a still narrower
+sense. That is to say, the word _intelligentsia_ is sometimes used by
+Russians to denote anybody who can read or write, anybody who has
+received a certain education. That is the broadest sense of the word. In
+this, its largest sense, the word means the whole of the middle class,
+from which nine-tenths of the officials and public servants are drawn.
+
+But when Russians use the word _intelligentsia_, they generally mean the
+members of the liberal professions, exclusive of officials.
+
+Again, some Russians use the word _intelligentsia_ in a still narrower
+sense, in order to denote not a class but a frame of mind; they use the
+word as we use a phrase such as “Nonconformist conscience:” and in this
+sense the member of the _intelligentsia_ could belong to any class, just
+as in England a Liberal, a Nonconformist, or a vegetarian could belong
+to any class. And it is the use of the word in this narrower sense that
+leads to misunderstanding. For if you describe or speak of the
+attributes and the characteristics of the _intelligentsia_ in this
+narrower sense, you run the risk of labelling the whole middle class of
+Russia with characteristics which do not apply to them; just as if in
+England the word Nonconformist were used not only to denote the
+Nonconformist sect, but the whole of the English middle class.
+
+So, before going further, it is well to make one’s position quite clear.
+In using the term _intelligentsia_ in this chapter, I mean to denote,
+firstly, the representatives of the liberal professions—lawyers,
+doctors, literary men, professors, schoolmasters, students, journalists,
+statists, and agricultural experts—the educated middle class, the
+intellectuals; and, secondly, the semi-intellectuals and the
+half-educated.
+
+The intellectuals form, at the present moment in Russia, a factor of
+great interest and of great importance. They are largely represented by
+a political party, called the Constitutional Democrats, the Kadets,
+which played an important part in the revolutionary movement. The whole
+mass of the newspapers, both in the provinces and in Moscow and St.
+Petersburg, with the exception of some organs of a conservative and
+reactionary tendency, are edited by the intellectuals among the
+_intelligentsia_; and the ordinary staff of every newspaper, who make
+the paper, are recruited from the semi-intellectuals of the
+_intelligentsia_. It was the _intelligentsia_ which, in the struggle for
+liberation, supplied the rank and file of the army, of which the county
+councils were the spokesmen and the leaders.
+
+There is, as Mr. Stephen Grahame, one of the most competent of modern
+observers of modern life in Russia, says, an articulate part of the
+_intelligentsia_, which he calls the higher _intelligentsia_, containing
+a great number of cultured and educated people; and side by side with
+this, there has sprung up lately a _bourgeoisie_ that calls itself
+_intelligentsia_—a lower middle class, which takes to itself fifty per
+cent. of the children born in the great towns to-day. Mr. Grahame calls
+this the lower _intelligentsia_, and stigmatizes this latter class in
+severe terms as being materialistic and cynical.
+
+I propose, then, to divide the middle class into two divisions—the
+educated and the half-educated.
+
+Ever since the revolutionary movement the _intelligentsia_ as a whole
+has come in for a large measure of abuse, not only from its enemies, but
+from members of its own class. It has for the first time in its
+comparatively brief history, if we except occasional indirect criticism,
+been subjected to a fierce and systematic criticism from the inside; the
+reason of this being that many Russian thinkers are convinced that the
+course of the revolutionary movement and the action of the first two
+Dumas showed that politically the Russian _intelligentsia_ was immature,
+inexperienced, unfit for political leadership, incapable of
+statesmanship, divorced in ideas and feelings from the people, and
+incapable of heading a popular movement. Some of these critics have gone
+further, and have dwelt on the religious indifferentism of the
+_intelligentsia_ as a class as the explanation of the inability of the
+_intelligentsia_ to act on the masses in Russia.
+
+“The fact is,” M. Bulgakov writes in the _Russian Review_ of November
+1912, “that educated or especially half-educated Russian society in its
+average representatives is almost without exception atheistic, or, to
+put it more correctly, indifferent to religion. A very superficial
+religious indifferentism, expressed most naturally in atheism, is met
+with on all sides, and everywhere in the Russian _intelligentsia_. The
+various political tendencies and parties among the _intelligentsia_
+carry on violent disputes with regard to various dogmas of sociological
+and political catechism, but do not discuss the existence or
+non-existence of God, or this or that religious belief. Here there are
+no questions, for it is taken for granted that there can be no talk of
+religion for the educated man, because religion is incompatible with
+enlightenment.” He goes on to say that the dogma that science has once
+and for all disposed of religion altogether is assimilated early in life
+by the “intelligent,” and in most cases is not re-examined for the rest
+of his life. “In religion the Russian _intelligentsia_ shows a kind of
+mental deficiency; on the average it is not above but below ideas of
+religion, for it has never properly experienced them.”
+
+This being so, the critics of the _intelligentsia_ go on to say “that
+this lack of religion condemns them to remain out of touch with the
+people, for if they are divorced from the people in that which the
+people hold most sacred, how can they come close to them at all?”
+
+There is nothing new in such criticism and such strictures; nearly all
+outside observers of Russia have said the same thing in the past. What
+is new is the quarter whence the criticism proceeds—namely, from the
+inside, from the _intelligentsia_ itself; and this signifies that a
+reaction, or rather a revolt, is proceeding in some quarters amidst this
+prevailing materialism and this superficial indifferentism.
+
+These are questions which are of great interest to the Russian reader.
+To the English reader, who probably has not the slightest idea of the
+nature of the ordinary member of the _intelligentsia_, the question is
+probably less interesting.
+
+Again, such critics, in writing for a Russian audience or for an English
+audience more or less acquainted with Russia, are not under the
+obligation of qualifying their statements by pointing out the good
+qualities and the merits of the _intelligentsia_, because they know that
+their readers are well aware of them, and will take them for granted.
+
+But as the English reader is unaware of their qualities, either good or
+bad, it would be misleading to dwell greatly on defects to those who are
+unacquainted with the general atmosphere and the main characteristics of
+the people under discussion.
+
+In the first place, the members of the _intelligentsia_ are Russians.
+This fact, strangely enough, seems often to be lost sight of by their
+opponents, who talk of them as if they were made of some totally
+different substance from the remaining part of the Russian people. And
+if this is true of the _intelligentsia_, it is still more true of the
+official world. Writers, and especially English writers, talk of Russian
+officials as if they too were made of some different stuff—as if they
+were a race apart which had nothing in common with the rest of the
+Russian people. This is not so. The _intelligentsia_ and the officials
+are Russians; and being Russians, they have certain qualities and
+certain defects which are probably common to all Russians, which are the
+natural result of the Russian temperament. Where they differ from the
+classes which are above them or beneath them is in their education—or
+rather in the effect which that education has had upon them. The disease
+is the same; it is the way of taking it which is different.
+
+They are extremely well educated; infinitely, incomparably better
+educated than the average Englishman. They are sometimes over-educated.
+The Russian mind assimilates with ease; it apprehends with incredible
+quickness; it is sensitive, receptive, plastic, agile. Such qualities in
+the case of men who are naturally thoughtful, studious, and serious,
+lead, of course, to a wide and deep culture. But in the case of the
+half-educated—in the case of people who quickly assimilate a smattering
+of the ideas that are in the air all over Europe—the result is a radical
+immaturity, something that is immature in its very overripeness,
+something shallow, thin, and superficial.
+
+In spite of this, if you take the average Russian of the educated middle
+class, he is extremely well educated—so much better educated than the
+average educated Englishman that comparison would be silly. The average
+Scotsman would compare favourably with him, and the average German: only
+the Russian has a quicker, more adaptable mind; and he is more
+inquisitive of what is going on outside the walls of his country than
+the average Frenchman.
+
+If you took an average schoolboy of thirteen, and put him at an English
+public school, he would find the work given to an average English
+schoolboy of thirteen not only easy, but childish.
+
+Moreover, the educated Russian is far more catholic in his culture than
+the average Englishman. A certain grasp of mathematics, of political
+economy and physical science, a knowledge of European history, would be
+looked upon by him as a matter of course, whereas the English public
+schools and universities turn out not only undergraduates but dons who
+have specialized in one subject—and sometimes not well in that—but
+reveal an astounding ignorance in every other branch of human knowledge.
+
+I remember once a Russian pointing out to me some remarks written in a
+popular book by an English don, and remarking that a Russian child could
+not possibly have written anything so silly. I, indeed, needed no
+persuasion. On the other hand, I remember one of the more radical
+members of the first Duma pointing out to me that in matters of
+practical political organization an English child could give the Russian
+political leaders points.
+
+Most educated Russians are familiar with the works of Herbert Spencer,
+Huxley, John Morley, Buckle, and John Stuart Mill. They are at the same
+time not only familiar with, but acutely appreciative of, humorous and
+serious English literature—of Dickens, Bret Harte, Wells, Jerome K.
+Jerome, Conan Doyle, etc.
+
+One of the stock things you constantly hear said about Russians is that
+they are wonderful linguists. I believe this generalization to be
+largely built on the prowess of Russian men and women who have had
+foreign nurses and governesses. It is true that in St. Petersburg and
+Moscow society every one talks French, and most people talk English, and
+nearly every one knows German. It cannot be said that the English of St.
+Petersburg is of the purest. It is a dialect peculiar to St. Petersburg,
+and full of strange idioms translated from the French. Such phrases as,
+for instance, “One says he is very frightful” (meaning, “They say he is
+very frightening”), or, “I find her a bother” (meaning a bore), are
+characteristic of that fluent dialect. However, if it is not pure, it is
+at any rate fluent.
+
+But if you take the average representative of the middle classes in
+Russia, you will sometimes meet with a knowledge of French, more often
+with a knowledge of German, and seldom with a conversational knowledge
+of English; but not universally with either of these three. Nor will you
+find that the average representative of the Russian middle class learns
+these languages with more than average speed when he is abroad; although
+the Russian is, as a rule, very quick to appreciate shades of meaning
+and forms of humour which are peculiar to other languages than his own.
+
+Taken as a whole, the middle class in Russia is cultivated, widely and
+deeply cultured in its upper strata, and in its best representatives
+more widely cultured than the average Frenchman or German. In its lower
+strata, among the half-educated, the “little learning” that has been
+rapidly assimilated has indeed proved a dangerous thing, and has
+produced in the head of the individual a salad of half-baked philosophy
+and superficial Nihilism which remains fixed for ever like a dogma.
+
+In this sense the half-educated in Russia are in a state of adolescence.
+They have cast aside what they regard as the superstitions of boyhood,
+and they have accepted as incontrovertible dogma the ideas which they
+believe to be the most advanced in Western Europe, and have poured them
+into a fixed mould, where they remain stereotyped for the rest of their
+lives.
+
+This is what M. Bulgakov means when he says the half-educated in Russia
+are not above religion, but below it; not superior to it, but inferior
+to it.
+
+In using the word half-educated, I am alluding to the larger class of
+people in Russia who have just emerged above the surface of the
+uneducated: members of the proletariat often, peasants sometimes who
+have received half an education, clerks and minor public servants, and
+students who have not passed any of the higher standards. It is amongst
+this class that you find a chaos and welter of half-baked ideas; it is
+here that you find a jumble, a salad of ill-assimilated and
+strangely-assorted goods, a flotsam and jetsam of Western philosophies
+and theories, crystallized and hardened into rigid dogma, and clung to
+and paraded with a desperate _amour propre_ and a fierce tenacity. It
+is, of course, the negative philosophies which are chosen. When a
+schoolboy reaches the age of adolescence—when he first makes the
+discovery in England, say, of Renan on the one hand, and of Swinburne,
+Ibsen, and Nietzsche on the other—he is tremendously proud of what seems
+to him his bold and rebellious “views:” he labels himself a
+“freethinker” and a pagan. He is filled with iconoclastic zeal. He feels
+like young Siegfried about to storm Walhalla, and bid its tottering
+halls crumble before his sword. If he is at the university, he will
+perhaps refuse to go to chapel from conscientious scruples, and he will
+wear a red tie on Sunday to show he is a Socialist.
+
+“I read the Gospel as an ordinary book,” said a young freethinker to the
+late Dr. Jowett, the Master of Balliol. “Really, Mr. Smith,” said the
+master, “you must find it a very extraordinary book.”
+
+Later on he finds the question is not quite so simple as he imagined,
+and that the old-fashioned superstitions are tougher than he imagined;
+that science has not spoken the last word on religion; and that certain
+facts and ideas had perhaps escaped his plausible philosophy. He makes
+the discovery that the higher criticism is not always infallible, and
+that disbelief is sometimes quite as intolerant as belief; that
+freethinkers are not always free. In fact, he grows up.
+
+But in the case of the Russian half-educated, they do not, as a rule,
+grow up intellectually. They reach the stage of rebellious and
+destructive denial, and remain there. Fragments of Nietzsche, Marx, and
+Schopenhauer contribute to the intellectual salad which constitutes
+their negative creed; and once that creed is formed, it no longer
+develops—because the atmosphere in which the half-educated live in in
+Russia they will meet with nothing to counterbalance this negative
+influence. They regard this negative philosophy as a thing which is
+taken for granted by all sensible and educated men, a thing about which
+there can be no possible doubt. Atheism is a matter of course, like a
+pair of trousers. There can be no other possible creed for an educated
+man. If a man is not an atheist he is not educated. Intellectually he
+wears his shirt outside his belt, and not tucked in. Socialism or
+Anarchism is the only possible political creed. If a man is not a
+Socialist or an Anarchist, he is obviously a member of the “black-gang”
+of reaction. Any educated man who goes to church or is religious is, in
+the eyes of the half-educated, a member of the black-gang—a fanatic, an
+anti-Semite, an obscurantist.
+
+He will remain stationary in this negative view, because this view is in
+the air he breathes and amongst the people with whom he consorts. He
+will never come across the contrary view; and he will consequently take
+for granted that all views to the contrary, all religious belief, all
+disbelief in disbelief, are confined to the uneducated, and that as soon
+as the uneducated (the peasants) receive the “light,” they will free
+themselves from these old-fashioned and cumbrous shackles of
+superstition. He will be, moreover, immensely proud of his negative
+creed, which he will regard as the hall-mark of culture and the password
+which admits him to the intellectual parliament of man, the enlightened
+federation of the world.
+
+Mr. Belloc, in one of his essays, I think, tells the story of an
+educated man who lived alone and isolated in a village in the Vosges,
+far removed from towns, railways, and means of communication. Thither
+Mr. Belloc wandered one day, and this man, who entertained him, unpacked
+with pride the baggage of portable atheism which was current in the
+’fifties. Mr. Belloc told him atheism was no longer thought to be an
+indispensable hall-mark of education, and no longer regarded as the key
+to all philosophies. He was distressed and bewildered. That is exactly
+what the half-educated in Russia are now being told by many Russian
+writers—Berdayev, Bulgakov, Ern, Rachinsky, Florensky, Kozhevnikov,
+Samarin, Mansurov; but the news has not yet penetrated into their inner
+consciousness.
+
+It had already been proclaimed by greater men than these—by Dostoievsky,
+Tyutchev, and Soloviev; but the message of these men of genius has not
+reached the hearts of the half-educated in Russia. They are still in the
+stage of the Oxford undergraduate who reads the Gospel as an “ordinary
+book.”
+
+But let us leave the half-educated and go back to the fully-educated. It
+is, perhaps, needless to say that Russia is rich in men of European
+reputation who have rendered noble service to science in many branches,
+and especially in medicine. What is perhaps less well known to English
+readers is that in the medical profession in Russia not only will you
+find many names which enjoy a European reputation, but the standard of
+competence, knowledge, and ability is almost universally high. All over
+Russia, no matter how remote the place, you will be sure to find a
+general practitioner who is not only highly competent, but highly
+cultivated. Moreover, these doctors live the hardest and most
+self-sacrificing of lives: they drive long distances in all weathers;
+they have to struggle against the enormous odds imposed on them by the
+rigorous climate, the poverty and the backwardness of the great mass of
+the people; and often they have to deal with scourges, such as epidemics
+of typhus, cholera, and even plague.
+
+Socially, the average member of the Russian middle class is attractive,
+expansive, and easy to get on with. He is completely devoid of
+hypocrisy, and untainted by snobbishness and pretension. He is friendly,
+good-humoured, and hospitable, and, when not afflicted by hypochondria,
+a cheerful companion. He is fond of discussion. An Englishman living
+with a Russian family is struck, as a rule, by the long conversations
+that go on, sometimes far on in the night, generally about politics or
+abstract questions. There is no conventional limit of hours. If these
+people want to go on playing cards all night, they will go on playing
+cards all night; they will not stop because they think “it is really
+time to go to bed.”
+
+In thinking over the characteristics of the educated middle class in
+Russia and the educated middle class in England, the chief differences
+are, of course, the same that differentiate the natural character of the
+Russian and the Englishman. The Russian middle class is, if you take the
+average, not only better educated, but more broad-minded, less
+provincial, less pretentious, far less reserved and less self-satisfied,
+and not at all hypocritical. It is also, I should say, less
+self-disciplined; and it has often struck me that those members of the
+_intelligentsia_ who are most violent and bitter in their denunciation
+of the arbitrary behaviour and the irresponsible despotism of the
+Government are, if one sees them on a committee, far more despotic and
+arbitrary than the most despotic official. But that is perhaps the
+logical law of human nature.
+
+The average Russian is certainly less self-satisfied than the average
+Englishman; although he is sometimes self-satisfied in some respects and
+in a quite different fashion.
+
+Self-praise is not a thing you often come across in the Russian
+_intelligentsia_. On the contrary, you far oftener have its members
+comparing themselves unfavourably with their neighbours. But this note
+of self-depreciation sometimes exists side by side with one of pride and
+vanity, which is sometimes pardonable and sometimes not. I came across
+an instance of this lately in a large Russian newspaper—the _Russkoe
+Slovo_.[12]
+
+A writer in an article on English life and Englishmen, in which he makes
+a number of interesting appreciations and criticisms, compares the two
+countries, and after making the debatable statement that, in his
+opinion, Russia and England are the only two countries which are now
+playing a significant part in the historical arena, says, “Yet what a
+gulf there is between us. How far more intelligent, how far more
+talented, how far broader-minded, how far more sincere are we!” It is
+difficult for either a Russian or an Englishman to settle such a
+question. They are neither of them the best judges; yet I should say,
+personally, that this writer is probably right, if you take the average.
+On the other hand, my impression is—and it may very likely be a false
+one—that this broad-mindedness, talent, cleverness, and sincerity is
+spread in a certain even proportion more or less equally and uniformly
+over a larger social stratum in Russia, producing a certain high level
+and standard of general intelligence; whereas in England, where no such
+high standard exists, you may encounter gulfs and precipices of
+complacent ignorance and narrow-minded stupidity; but, on the other
+hand, you will meet with high peaks and jagged rocks of originality,
+imagination, and sometimes genius. In England, while the general
+standard of intelligence is immeasurably lower, the exceptions are more
+remarkable, and not merely because they are exceptions, but in
+themselves. Contemporary literature affords a good example of what I
+mean. In Russia, the average reading public and the novel-reading public
+is on a much higher level than the average English-reading and
+novel-reading public, and the average literature food supplied to it is
+higher also: the average Russian novel or story never descends to the
+level of silliness which you find in the great majority of English
+magazines. On the other hand, contemporary English literature contains
+more names that are famous, and whose fame has crossed the frontiers of
+their country, than contemporary Russian literature. For instance, if we
+put Gorky with Kipling as belonging to a past generation, there is in
+Russia no imaginative writer of the present generation who can be
+compared with H. G. Wells; no realistic novel as fine as Arnold
+Bennett’s _Old Wives’ Tale_; no writer as original as G. K. Chesterton.
+
+The Russian stage is on a far higher intellectual level than the English
+stage, and the Russian theatre-going public is incomparably more
+intelligent than the English theatre-going public; yet the Russians have
+no dramatist whose plays (with the exception of one play by Gorky) are
+acted all over Europe, such as those of Bernard Shaw. The ordinary
+Russian intellectual may despise Bernard Shaw’s philosophy and drama—in
+fact, the writer of the article I have just quoted cites as an instance
+of the low level of the English stage, the fact that Bernard Shaw who,
+he says, is “a back number” in Russia, is considered the first of
+English dramatists. But is it certain the Russian has realized Shaw’s
+humour to the full? This, moreover, does not prevent it being true that
+Bernard Shaw’s plays are acted all over Europe, as well as in Russia;
+that the French have called him the modern Molière; and that
+contemporary Russia has produced no dramatist who can claim so large a
+public, nor so wide an appreciation in Europe.
+
+The writer of the article I have quoted says that the Russians and the
+English are alike in possessing two faces. In generalizing on the
+characteristics of a people, and especially the Russian and the English
+people, one must always bear in mind the element of paradox and
+contradiction that exists. With regard to the English people, this
+writer notes the fact of the contrasts you meet with in England, and the
+dual nature of the English character; but whereas he notes the naïveté
+of the English public, its boisterous mirth in contrast to the serious
+element in many phases of English life, the imaginative quality of the
+English seems to have escaped him. “I think we are an imaginative
+people,” writes Mr. Wells about the English in India, “with an
+imagination at once gigantic, heroic, and shy; and also we are a
+strangely restrained and disciplined people who are yet neither subdued
+nor subordinated.... These are flat contradictions to state, and yet how
+else can one render the paradox of the English character and the
+spectacle of a handful of mute, snobbish, not obviously clever, and
+quite obviously ill-educated men, holding together kingdoms, tongues,
+and races, three hundred millions of them, in a restless, fermenting
+peace?”
+
+“Yes, it is true,” I would answer to this Russian journalist; “probably
+true that you are far more intelligent, far more talented, more
+broad-minded, and less hypocritical than we are.” And then I would ask
+him to read some further words of Mr. Wells, which concern circles of
+the official English in India, “conventional, carefully ‘turned out’
+people, living gawkily, thinking gawkily, talking nothing but sport and
+gossip, relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality and levity as
+mean as a banjo tune.” Among such, he says, “a kind of despairful
+disgust would engulf me. And then, in some man’s work, in some huge
+irrigation scheme, some feat of strategic foresight, some simple,
+penetrating realization of deep-lying things, I would find an effect, as
+if out of a thickly-rusted sheath one had pulled a sword and found it a
+flame.”
+
+The Russian writer has forgotten, or has never come across, the flame;
+and that is not surprising, for the flame is not obvious to the casual
+observer. But the Russian character has felt its heat, expressed as it
+is in the phases and images of English writers of genius in the present
+as well as in the past. The flame has left its marks on Russian
+literature.
+
+I can imagine a Russian brooding or reasoning over Russia—say the Russia
+of the remoter provinces—much in the same way as Wells reasons over the
+British in India. I can imagine him saying: “Again and again I would
+find myself in little circles of minor official Russians, slovenly,
+superficial, despotic in their disregard of other people, lax, casual,
+cynical, carefully ‘educated’ people, living noisily, thinking noisily,
+talking nothing but cheap philosophy and gossip, relaxing at frequent
+intervals into fits of drunkenness, gambling, and extravagance, as
+sordid as the tune of a barrel organ, and a kind of despairful disgust
+would engulf me. And then in some man’s speech, in some sudden flash of
+white-hot sincerity, some stripping naked of the soul, some gesture of
+human charity, some evidence of sympathy and understanding, some simple,
+penetrating realization of divine things, I would find an effect, as if
+in a heap of mouldering refuse, festering weeds, and broken bottles I
+had stumbled across a tin box, and forcing it open, found it filled with
+precious balm and myrrh—celestial in its fragrance.” And then perhaps he
+might have added: “I think we are a great-hearted people with a humanity
+at once charitable, broad, and deep; and yet we are a tough, obstinate,
+arbitrary, and undisciplined people, who are as yet neither socially
+independent nor politically free. These are flat contradictions.” I am
+certain of one thing. Any generalizations on the characteristics of any
+people must include flat contradictions, and especially any
+generalizations on the Russians of any class; for the whole of Russian
+history is based like a fairy tale on a huge paradox—namely, the
+survival of the weakest, and the triumph of the fool of the family; the
+strength of the fool being that he has something divine in his folly
+which outwits the wisdom of the wise.
+
+In speaking of the prevailing dead level of a high standard in things
+intellectual in Russia, I gave literature as an example. Perhaps I ought
+to cite some of the sister arts as exceptions; but with the exception of
+music, perhaps, the same rule applies here too. In the decorative arts
+Bakst has attained a European reputation, and in stage design and stage
+decoration Russia stands perhaps higher than any other European country
+at present. But here it should be noted that one of the great pioneers
+in advanced stage decoration in Russia was Gordon Craig, also a case in
+point of the startling exception, startling in himself as well as an
+exception to the encircling mediocrity. The Russian stage has felt not
+only his influence, but his direct inspiration; and Aubrey Beardsley is
+responsible in Russia for a whole chaos of decadent illustrators. Then
+there is music, in which Russia is collectively and individually far
+superior to England at present. These are questions which need separate
+and more detailed treatment; but it is worth while mentioning here that
+the greatest exception to the rule—if it is a rule—that in Russia you
+will find a high standard and few towering exceptions, is to be found in
+the operatic stage in the person of Shalyapin, who by common consent is,
+besides being a magnificent singer, the greatest living actor and artist
+on the operatic stage, and perhaps on any other stage either. On the
+other hand, the first theatre in Moscow, the Art Theatre, furnishes an
+example of the original rule—nowhere in Europe is the _ensemble_ so
+perfect, the troupe so well disciplined, the production so harmonious;
+yet the company contains no single actor or actress of genius.
+
+It is, of course, the _intelligentsia_ who suffered most in the past,
+since the epoch of the great reforms of the ’sixties, from the want of
+political liberty in Russia, and it is from the ranks of the
+_intelligentsia_ that the revolutionary movement started. They had,
+until the creation of the first Duma, no means at all of taking part in
+public life unless they became officials and entered the Government
+service.
+
+Those who did not play an active part in politics were not, it is true,
+or were only indirectly, hampered by this state of things. They were
+hampered, that is to say, by the censorship on certain books and on
+certain ideas, by the caution of the press and the absence of public
+debate, by the liability of falling under the suspicion of political
+heterodoxy; whereas those who took a part in the revolutionary movement,
+either directly or indirectly, were liable at any moment to suffer in
+person for their opinions, and they did suffer. In their action as
+active revolutionaries, in the manner in which they were ready to
+undergo any sacrifices, however great and however tedious, the Russian
+revolutionaries belong to the great and authentic martyrs of the world.
+They sacrificed themselves without any fuss or ostentation. They were
+willing to endure years and years of imprisonment or exile if they
+thought that would benefit their cause. They went on hungerstrike when
+the rules of their imprisonment were not being properly carried out, if
+the quality of the food supplied to them was not up to the standard, or
+if the prison regulations were not being properly fulfilled; but not
+because they were put in prison. That they accepted as a rule of the
+game. Nothing broke their indomitable and patient purpose. They were
+ready to abandon everything which makes life worth living, and they
+claimed neither the hero’s laurel wreath nor the martyr’s crown. They
+were content to be anonymous; they gladly gave their bodies to be
+crushed, if, they thought, they could thus make stepping-stones over
+which future generations could walk. The Russian revolutionaries did not
+go out of their way to seek to lose their lives; but they were ready, if
+the occasion demanded it, to give their lives. But as far as their main
+policy was concerned, they took the offensive against the Government;
+and not being allowed to express their opinions in print or in public,
+they expressed them with dynamite.
+
+In looking back at the whole movement, one is struck by the absence of
+cant in the methods, the writings, and the behaviour of the _active_
+revolutionaries. They were as simple and as natural in their
+assassinations and their martyrdom as they were in the rest of their
+behaviour. They showed the same absence of hypocrisy. Some people call
+this the Russian simplicity; others call it (Mr. Conrad, for instance)
+Russian cynicism. It is, if you like, a kind of inverted cynicism; a
+reckless way of looking facts in the face, and of stripping the soul of
+all its decent trappings. And yet there is nothing Mephistophelian about
+it—no mockery, no irony, but an inverted and inflexible logic which
+leads people to disregard all barriers and to carry out in practice what
+they preach in theory, though they should cause the pillars of the world
+to fall crashing to the ground.
+
+I have been speaking, of course, about the active and militant members
+among the revolutionaries, not of its platonic and passive sympathizers.
+Amongst those you may find the political cant which is common to that
+species of mankind, of all races and in all countries.
+
+But if you take the Russian middle class as a whole, absence of cant and
+hypocrisy is certainly one of their chief characteristics. Uniformity of
+education is certainly another. “Culture” is made into a fetish (and
+this is true of all educated people in Russia). A certain stereotyped
+form of culture, including a certain number of subjects, is looked upon
+as being as indispensable as clothes. A man who is lacking in the
+visible label and hall-mark of this so-called “culture” is looked upon
+as if he were morally naked.
+
+The worst of it is, the possession of this culture does not necessarily
+mean that its possessor is cultivated. It is often skin-deep and a
+random assortment of superficial ideas, confined sometimes to the
+knowledge of certain names and catchwords, and to a second-hand
+acquaintance with certain books, theories, and currents of thought.
+
+The idea that this kind of “culture” is indispensable, and that a man
+who does not possess it is uneducated, is undoubtedly a bureaucratic
+idea, and the fruits of the long-standing existence of bureaucracy. Such
+culture is a superstition, and has nothing necessarily to do with real
+culture, which implies the assimilation and the thorough digestion of
+any kind of knowledge.
+
+But, as I have said before, it is more especially to the half-educated
+that this applies. The truly well-educated middle class have revealed
+their culture to the world in the shape of the men of science, the
+historians, the economists they have produced, and the books they have
+written.
+
+But the Russian intellectual middle class is historically still young.
+The greatest works of the Russian genius in the past were written before
+it existed, when they were as nothing, and came from the nobility. The
+future will show what the _intelligentsia_ in their turn will produce.
+But such as it is at the present moment, it offers to the student of
+Russia a field of surpassing interest; and the Englishman who goes to
+Russia and lives among its members will come back, as a rule, with the
+horizon of his mind widened, and in his heart a soft spot for the
+Russian _intelligentsia_.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VIII.
+                          THE RUSSIAN CHURCH.
+
+
+The Russian Church calls itself the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Orthodox
+Church. It is a national Church, and at the same time it is a branch of
+a great Christian community which includes many nations and
+peoples—namely, the Eastern Orthodox Church.
+
+The Russian Orthodox Church numbers at present over a hundred million
+adherents, eighty millions of which are Russian subjects; of the
+remainder about half are Slavs of old Turkey or of Austro-Hungary.
+Greeks, Roumanians, Bulgarians, and Serbs all belong to the Orthodox
+Church, and the Orthodox Church has missions in China, Japan, and North
+America.
+
+Until the eleventh century the Eastern and the Western Churches formed
+one Church. In the eleventh century a schism broke this unity and
+divided a large fragment of the Eastern Church from the Western Church.
+
+Even after the schism had taken place, even as late as the beginning of
+the twelfth century, intercommunion existed between the two Churches,
+and Russian princes and princesses of Kiev intermarried with members of
+the Latin Church. Efforts were made later to heal the schism, the most
+important of which were the second Council of Lyons in 1274 and the
+Council of Florence in 1439. At both these Councils union was proclaimed
+and accepted by the Greeks, but neither of them had any permanent
+result. The findings of the first of these two Councils soon became a
+dead letter; those of the second were repudiated as soon as the Greek
+delegates reached home, and the delegates were regarded as apostates.
+Thus the schism has lasted practically since 1054. It was fraught with
+deep moral and political consequences for the East, and especially for
+Russia. The cause of it was not really doctrinal or dogmatical. Points
+of dogma, and trivial points at that, were used as pretexts after the
+schism had become a _fait accompli_. The true cause of the schism was
+the immemorial rivalry between the Greeks and the Latins.
+
+The schism between the Eastern and Western Churches ranks, Sir Charles
+Eliot says in his _Turkey and Europe_, with the foundation of
+Constantinople and the coronation of Charlemagne, as one of the
+turning-points in the relations of the East and the West. It was
+disastrous to Russia and to the Byzantine Empire. To the latter, because
+it crystallized and deepened an antagonism which prevented the East and
+West from combining against the common enemy, and thus proved one of the
+main causes of the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the establishment of
+the Turk in Europe. To Russia, because, isolated as she was already by
+her geographical situation, by this further isolation and rupture with
+the West she fell an easy prey to the hordes of barbarian invaders from
+Asia, and her national development was interrupted for centuries. As far
+as dogma is concerned, the differences between the two Churches are to
+this day trivial, and in earlier times they were slighter still. The
+Orthodox Church has the same seven Sacraments as the Catholic
+Church—namely, Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Penance, Unction,
+Holy Order, and Matrimony.
+
+There is a certain difference in the administration of the Sacraments.
+The Orthodox baptize with a threefold immersion. Confirmation is
+administered immediately after baptism; and this was so in the West
+during all the thirteenth century. Auricular confession is regarded as
+indispensable by the Orthodox, but the Sacrament of Penance is less
+precise and more flexible than in the West. The Orthodox Church holds
+the dogma of Transubstantiation. That is to say, the Orthodox believe
+that the Holy Eucharist is the true body and blood of Jesus Christ under
+the outward appearances of bread and wine, and that transubstantiation
+takes place—namely, the change of the inward imperceptible substance
+into another substance; while all the species and accidents—that is to
+say, those qualities which are outwardly perceived by the senses, such
+as colour, taste or shape—remain unchanged. They reject all explanation
+of a typical or subjective presence. Holy Communion is given in both
+kinds to the laity; the Sacrament is administered by means of a golden
+spoon, in which particles of the bread of the Eucharist float in the
+consecrated wine. Infants receive Holy Communion after baptism. The
+Sacrament of Extreme Unction, called by the Russians _Soborovanie_ (that
+is to say, Unction without the extreme), is administered by several
+priests, and is not reserved for those _in extremis_; it is regarded
+less as a preparation for death than as a means of healing the sick.
+
+With regard to Holy Order, no priest in Russia is allowed to marry after
+he is ordained. He is married before he is ordained, and marriage has
+become a necessary preliminary to Order.
+
+The Orthodox Church proclaims the indissolubility of marriage, but in
+practice admits that the infidelity of one of the parties authorizes
+separation. Violation of the conjugal oath is regarded as annulling the
+sacrament, and only the injured party is allowed to remarry.
+
+The Orthodox have the same fundamental cycle of feasts as the Catholics.
+The Holy Liturgy is said according to two rites—those of St. John
+Chrysostom and of St. Basil.[13]
+
+The Orthodox observe four great fasts: Advent, forty days from November
+15 until Christmas Eve; Lent, beginning on the Monday after the sixth
+Sunday before Easter; thirdly, a period from the first Sunday after
+Pentecost until June 28; fourthly, the fast of the Mother of God from
+August 1 to August 15. According to the Orthodox fast, only one meal is
+allowed a day, and abstinence not only from meat, but from fish, butter,
+milk, cheese, eggs, and oil is required. The fasts are carried out by
+the poor with great strictness, and even among the wealthier classes
+there is more fasting and abstinence during Lent than in the West.
+Statues of our Lord or of saints are forbidden, but pictures and any
+images on a flat surface are allowed.
+
+To sum up, the foundations of the Orthodox faith are: Belief in one God
+in three Persons, in the Incarnation of God the Son, the Redemption of
+Mankind by the sacrifice of His Life, the Church founded by Him with her
+Sacraments, the Resurrection of the Body, the Life Everlasting. They
+have a hierarchy; they accept the Deutero-canonical books of Scripture
+as equal to the others; they believe in and use seven sacraments; they
+honour, invoke, and pray to saints; they have a cult of holy pictures
+and relics; they look with infinite reverence to the Mother of God.
+
+In all these main points, which I have here enumerated, there is no
+difference between the Orthodox Church of the East and the Catholic
+Church of the West. The two Churches originally separated on minor
+questions of discipline; they are at present separated by certain
+questions of dogma as well. But the great difference between the two
+Churches is the difference of constitution, which proceeds from the very
+fact of the separation. The first difference in dogma between the two
+Churches is the procession of the Holy Ghost. The Eastern Church refuses
+to add the word _filioque_ to the Nicean Creed. But even here, although
+the Orthodox do not admit that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Son as
+well as from the Father, they have never explicitly stated a contrary
+belief; and although they deny that the twofold procession can be
+inserted in the Creed, they grant it allows of an orthodox
+interpretation. This is a purely theological dispute, and to this day it
+remains the chief point of difference between the two Churches. The two
+Churches differ in their conception of purgatory; the Orthodox pray for
+the dead, and believe in a middle state, where the dead sleep and wait
+passively; but they do not define the matter any further, and they
+reject all idea of the purification by spiritual fire. They deny that
+souls which have departed this life can expiate their faults, or at
+least the only expiation they admit are the prayers of the faithful and
+the Holy Mysteries.
+
+The Orthodox deny the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The Catholic
+dogma of the Immaculate Conception is that all mankind are from their
+conception tainted with Original Sin, except the Blessed Virgin, who by
+a special privilege and grace of God was preserved immaculate—that is,
+free from the stain of Original Sin from the first moment of her
+conception.
+
+I repeat this definition because it is not generally known to Protestant
+Englishmen, who, as a rule, confuse the Immaculate Conception with the
+Incarnation of our Lord, and I know of cases where they obstinately
+maintain this belief in the face of evidence.
+
+The doctrine, although not accepted in theory by the Eastern Church, is
+practically a part of their belief—that is to say, they never cease to
+call the Blessed Virgin All Immaculate, or Very Immaculate.
+
+Finally, the Orthodox Church denies the dogma of Papal Infallibility.
+This is in reality the only difference between the two Churches which
+has any real importance, either religious or political, because it
+includes any other possible difference, and from it proceeds the
+difference in constitution and in political situation between the two
+Churches.
+
+For Catholics the door on dogmatic definition has been left open
+indefinitely; for while holding, _de fide_, that the revelation made to
+the apostles was final and complete, new _definition_ of the revelation,
+as is seen in the creeds, as heresies arise, or as fuller expansion of
+doctrine, is admitted indefinitely.
+
+On the other hand, the Orthodox believe that the time for definition has
+been closed, once and for all, and for ever. They believe that nothing
+can be added to the decisions of the first Seven Great Councils, which
+took place before the schism between the two Churches, and which
+contained, according to them, the infallible, final, complete, and
+unalterable definition of the Church and the dogmas of the faith. The
+Orthodox regard the first Seven Councils to have been infallible in the
+definition of dogma, exactly in the same way as Catholics consider the
+Pope to be infallible in his capacity of supreme Pastor of the Church,
+when speaking _ex cathedrâ_ he defines revealed truth and teaches points
+of faith or of morals. The Orthodox deny that the Pope has authority
+over the whole Church. The Russian and the Greek catechisms agree that
+the Church has no other head than Jesus Christ, our Lord—so far this
+agrees with the Catholic catechism—and that He is represented by no
+vicar on earth. The Orthodox regard the Pope as the Patriarch of the
+West, and legitimate first Patriarch (_primus inter pares_), but they
+reject his universal claim.
+
+And as the first Seven Councils left some matters undefined and the
+Fathers of the Church did not foresee all possible contingencies, such
+matters remain undefined in the Orthodox Church.
+
+Since the Orthodox Church possesses neither a spiritual sovereign nor an
+international capital, such as Rome, it naturally tends to
+decentralization, and hence the growth of national and independent
+Churches, which the Greeks call autocephalous.
+
+The Russian Church was the first to establish its independence, and the
+example of Russia was followed by Greece, Servia, and Roumania.
+
+In 1872 Bulgaria, in obedience to its national interests, seceded from
+the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, in order
+to be no longer classed with the Greeks; for, according to the Turkish
+system, all those who submitted to the jurisdiction of Constantinople
+were officially classed as “Greeks.”
+
+Thus the Bulgarians formed an autonomous Church in the domains of the
+Ottoman Empire, alongside of the Greek Church, before Bulgaria
+constituted a State, and for so doing they incurred the anathema of the
+Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, and were condemned as
+heretical, since the patriarchate maintained that the delimitation of
+ecclesiastical jurisdiction should correspond to political delimitation,
+and that in the same political state there could only be one Church.
+Bulgaria’s action, therefore, was contrary to church canon—that is,
+heretical. Nevertheless its independence was recognized by the Sultan,
+and the Bulgarian Church was established under an Exarch of its own,
+while Russia, without making any definite pronouncement, nevertheless
+never accepted the anathema of Constantinople.
+
+A few years later Bulgaria became an independent principality, and had
+the jurisdiction of the Bulgarian Exarchate been limited to the
+principality of Bulgaria, the Œcumenical Patriarchate would have been
+logically bound to recognize it; but according to the firmans of the
+Sultan, the jurisdiction of the Bulgarian Exarchate extended beyond the
+frontiers of Bulgaria, and included the dioceses of Thrace and
+Macedonia, which nominally belonged to the Sultan and were a bone of
+contention between the Greek and the Slav influence. Thus the
+Greco-Bulgarian schism continued. This question has now once again
+sprung into importance. The dioceses of Macedonia and some of those in
+Thrace, which were under the religious jurisdiction of Bulgaria, and
+under the political dominion of the Porte, are now, as the result of the
+latest wars in the Balkans, and of the Treaty of Bucharest, partly in
+the hands of the Servians, and partly in the hands of the Greeks.
+Hitherto the Bulgarian Exarchate was the nucleus around which all the
+elements of Bulgarian nationality in Macedonia were gathered; but now,
+owing to the second Balkan War, the Bulgarians in Macedonia come under
+the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan of Servia, and are in fear,
+consequently, of losing their nationality, since the Bulgars fear that
+neither their churches nor their national schools will succeed in
+maintaining their existence in the new Greek and Servian territory. The
+consequence was, that some of the Bulgars in those parts of Macedonia
+talked of secession from the Orthodox Church, and submission to the
+Church of Rome, or of embracing Protestantism, as the best means of
+preserving their nationality.[14]
+
+In spite of these differences, the Russian Church and the independent
+Churches of the East form in reality one, for if they lack unity of
+organization, they possess unity of creed, and the unity of creed is
+ensured by its immutabilty, which renders unnecessary all international
+authority or periodical congresses. Since matters of dogma have been
+discussed once and for all, or have been left vague and undefined
+indefinitely, there is nothing for such an authority to define, and
+nothing for such a congress to discuss. And the panegyrists of the
+Orthodox Church are proud of the lack of central authority and the
+organization of the Churches according to States, which they consider
+combine unity of creed with ecclesiastical independence, according to
+Homayakov’s formula, “Unity of freedom in love.”
+
+But if the nationalization of the Oriental Churches is a source of
+strength, it is at the same time a source of weakness, for the result of
+the national constitution of the Orthodox Churches, and of their having
+no spiritual head, has been that many of its branches have been
+secularized, and of this the Russian Church is a signal example.
+
+The Orthodox Churches, and especially the Russian Church, were thrown
+open to the civil power, the power of the State, and became subordinate
+to it.
+
+The Russian Church became subject to the State. It is often said
+that such a circumstance is a guarantee of political liberty and of
+liberty of thought; but neither the history of Russia nor that of
+the Greek empire furnishes us with examples to the point. Both in
+the history of Russia and of Byzantium we are confronted with two
+phenomena—intellectual stagnation and political despotism—to which
+the Church seems to have contributed, since being subject to the
+State she had no means of resisting civil authority, and the power
+of the State was left without a single check. The civil authority
+had the support of ecclesiastic authority, and the temporal
+authority was backed up by the spiritual power; no obstacle was
+raised in the path of autocracy.
+
+The alliance of Church and State kept down the intellectual growth of
+the nation within, and prevented the invasion of new ideas from without.
+The result of the alliance was stagnation and isolation. And in the East
+there was no common clerical language, as Latin in the West, to help
+civilization, for the Greek Church did not impose its language on its
+sister Churches, but left to each the use of its own tongue.
+
+This peculiar constitution of the Russian Church, as Sir Charles Eliot
+puts it, “has produced in Russia an almost Mohammedan confusion of
+Church and State, or at least of religion and politics.”
+
+But this state of things did not come about all at once.
+
+Christianity reached Russia through Byzantium at a time (988 A.D.) when
+the Eastern Church was still in communion with Rome, after a temporary
+schism between the East and West; a Russian Metropolitan held the see of
+Kiev, and was appointed by the Patriarch of Constantinople. During this
+period the Russian Church was a province of the Byzantine Patriarchate.
+
+Then came the Tartar invasion and the migration of the Russian princes
+to the basin of the Volga, and finally to Moscow. Moscow had a
+Metropolitan who was still suffragan of the Greek patriarch, but elected
+by his clergy and chosen by his sovereign. This was the second phase of
+the Russian Church during which it gradually acquired its independence.
+Moscow became a kingdom, and at the death of Ivan the Terrible, in 1589,
+Russia demanded a Patriarch. In 1589 Job, the Metropolitan of Moscow,
+was consecrated Patriarch. This was brought about by Boris Godunov, in
+the reign of Feodor, the successor of Ivan the Terrible (1589).
+
+Thus began the third phase of the history of the Russian Church—the
+phase of its independence. The Russian Church was henceforward
+independent of Constantinople.
+
+There were ten Patriarchs of Moscow in succession. At first they played
+a powerful and important part in Russian history, and helped to save
+Russia from foreign dominion.
+
+The culminating point in the history of the independent Church was
+reached when in the reign of Alexis, in 1642, Nikon became Patriarch.
+
+The Patriarchate of Nikon had two great and far-reaching
+results—firstly, a conflict with the civil authority which ended in his
+defeat and deposition from the patriarchal throne, and in a consequent
+loss of prestige to the patriarchate; and secondly, a schism which tore
+the Russian Church in two, and which was the result of a wise reform—the
+revision of the text of liturgical books, into whose text, owing to
+continuous copying and recopying, inaccuracies had crept.
+
+Nikon spoke with great energy against the supremacy of the State over
+the Church. Six years after his consecration, he was brought before a
+Council, condemned and deposed, thanks to the intrigues of the Boyars.
+His revision of the texts was accepted by the Council, but not by a
+great part of the Russian people, who clung obstinately to the old
+unrevised books and called themselves “Old Believers.” Hence arose the
+great schism of the Russian Church. The “Old Believers,” were persecuted
+and became fanatical. Besides the revision of the texts, Nikon changed
+one or two trifling details of ritual in the liturgy. This was enough to
+convulse Russia. Later on, all enemies of foreign innovations flocked to
+the camp of the “Old Believers,” endured any persecution, however
+severe; and the net result of this, at the present moment, is that there
+are 25,000,000 Russians who live in schism from the Russian Church.
+
+The fall of Nikon established once and for all the authority of the
+State over that of the Church, and the great schism weakened the
+authority of the Church, owing to the secession from it of a great part
+of the nation. The patriarchate was shaken and weakened; but weak as it
+was, it appeared too strong to suit the taste of Peter the Great, who
+abolished it in 1721.
+
+In its place he established the Holy Directing Synod. Thus began the
+fourth phase of the Russian Church, which has lasted until to-day.
+
+There is nothing necessarily anti-liberal in the existence of a synod,
+and it is not peculiar to the Russian Church. Greece, Roumania, and
+Servia administer their Churches by means of a synod. Its tendencies
+depend necessarily on the manner of its election, the nature of its
+guarantees, the laws and customs of the country in which it exists.
+
+The Holy Synod consists at the present day of executive members and
+assistants, of permanent and temporary members. Among the permanent
+members are the Metropolitans of Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, and
+the Exarch of Georgia. The temporary members consist of four or five
+archbishops, bishops or archimandrites, the emperor’s chaplain, and the
+head chaplain of the forces. All the members are appointed by the
+Emperor, and in addition to these ecclesiastics, the Emperor appoints a
+delegate who is called the Procurator-General. The procurator is a
+layman, and represents the civil authority. His duty is to see that
+ecclesiastical affairs are carried out in accordance with the imperial
+ukases. No act of the synod is valid unless he confirms it. He has the
+right of veto, should its decisions be contrary to the law. Practically,
+therefore, but not theoretically, he controls the synod; and in his turn
+he carries out the will and obeys the orders of the Emperor.
+
+It would be a great mistake, however, whatever may be the result of this
+institution in practice, to call the Emperor of Russia the head of the
+Russian Church. He makes no such claim, and Russian orthodoxy recognizes
+only one Head of the Church, our Lord, and only one infallible authority
+speaking in His name, the Seven First Œcumenical Councils. The Emperor
+may be the autocratic master of the Church; he is not the head of it.
+His authority is from the outside only. In questions of dogma he has no
+authority at all. He is regarded as the temporal defender and guardian
+of the Church; his authority, and consequently the authority of the
+State, concerns the administration of the Church solely, and even here
+his power is limited by tradition, canon law, and the œcumenical
+character of the Church.
+
+Dogma is equally outside the domain of the Holy Synod, and even
+disciplinary measures come before the Holy Synod as before a commission
+of inquiry, the final decision remaining with the Church.
+
+Such is the teaching of the Russian Church with regard to relations of
+Church and State, and the position of the Emperor with regard to the
+Church.
+
+Yet in spite of this, there is no Church where the influence and the
+authority of the State is so deeply felt as in the Russian Church; for
+in practice the Church is governed through the Holy Synod, and not
+through the bishops, for the synod overrules the bishops, and in
+practice, and in spite of the theory, the procurator overrules the
+synod, and the procurator is the civil authority in the flesh. The
+Russian Church is consequently, in practice, a State Church, and many of
+its earnest members have never ceased to deplore the fact.
+
+Russian books dealing with theological questions in the past are full of
+this bitter and oft-reiterated complaint; but I will quote what an
+apologist of the Russian Church wrote as short time ago as November
+1912, showing that the complaint of the past is if anything more vital
+now than ever. In an article on the Russian public and religion, S.
+Bulgakov says that a faithful and powerful ally of the atheism of the
+_intelligentsia_ is without doubt the secular character of the Church,
+its ruinous dependence on the State under the synod _régime_, and owing
+to the absence of self-government. He also says that one of the reasons
+of the alienation from the Church, not only of the _intelligentsia_ but
+of the people, is the bureaucratic caste of the Church administration,
+the access of officialdom and arbitrary power to the fields of freedom
+and love. “It is not,” he writes, “a question of any corruption or
+distortion of dogma; on the contrary, the Russian Church adheres with
+devotion to the dogmas of the Universal Church.
+
+“The main lever by which the State directs the Church at present is the
+episcopacy, which, contrary to canon, is appointed by, and consequently
+to a certain extent picked out by, secular authority. The Holy Synod is
+likewise chosen from these bishops, and by secular authority also....
+The bishops, who should remain all their life in their dioceses, have
+been commuted into ecclesiastical governors, changing dioceses more
+quickly than the governors change provinces.... Theoretically, the
+Orthodox Church should be self-governing from top to bottom, but the
+painful reality reveals on the contrary so great a paralysis in the
+public life of the Church, as to give the outside observer the
+impression that nothing is here but ecclesiastical governors, under the
+direction of the procurator of the Holy Synod and the secular authority
+that is behind him, with a clergy stripped of all rights.”
+
+Such a statement sums up what has been constantly said in the past, and
+what is being said with increasing vehemence in the present by earnest
+members of the Russian Church, who recognize with sorrow the almost
+total alienation of the Church from the educated classes, and look
+forward with apprehension to the day when the indifference of the
+educated and the street-corner atheism of the half-educated shall spread
+to the peasantry. But, on the other hand, the very fact that such
+statements are made shows that side by side with the growth of
+rationalism there is a movement in the opposite direction as well.
+
+Many years ago, in the days of the fathers and grandfathers of the
+present generation, educated Russia was divided into two camps—the
+Slavophils and the Westernisers. The leaders of the Westernism were
+Bielinsky and Herzen; those of the Slavophils, Homyakov, a poet and the
+father of the Ex-President of the Duma; and others.
+
+The Westernisers saw in rationalism and atheism the last word of Western
+culture, and made a religion out of socialistic Utopias, and at the same
+time took part with a fervent enthusiasm in the struggle for political
+freedom. Orthodoxy and the Church were to them an expression of
+despotism and reaction.
+
+The Slavophils, who were, in their most flourishing epoch, by no means
+political reactionaries, and being more cultured than their opponents,
+were saturated with the philosophy, art, and religion of the West,
+nevertheless revered the religious character of the sovereign’s
+authority, based Utopias on it likewise, and, in contradistinction to
+the cosmopolitan ideal of the Westernisers, for whom nationality did not
+exist except ethnographically, made a cult of nationality which for them
+was inseparable from religion and orthodoxy. There was the same
+difference between their ideals as there is now between those of Mr.
+Chesterton and Mr. Blatchford; only whereas in England Mr. Chesterton
+has but few followers, the Slavophils were expressing the inarticulate
+aspirations of the great mass of the Russian people.
+
+Slavophilism was represented by many men of genius, such as Dostoievsky
+the novelist and Vladimir Soloviev the philosopher.
+
+Its tradition has not died out, and although the majority of the
+_intelligentsia_ may be adherents of the opposite school, yet the
+descendants of the Slavophils have many notable representatives among
+the minority (whose names I have already cited) in philosophy, art, and
+literature; and a universal characteristic of them is their interest in
+religion.
+
+The ordinary Russian street-corner atheist sees in the Church nothing
+but an instrument of clerical obscurantism and political reaction. He
+looks at the matter from the outside, and, from his point of view, the
+opinion is excusable.
+
+But the descendants of Slavophilism look at the Church from the inside.
+They know from experience the blessing of the Sacraments, the majesty of
+an immemorial tradition, the glory of a mystical and liturgical Church
+whose ritual and liturgy is one of inexpressible richness, depth, and
+beauty. Even to the most indifferent agnostic the Russian Church affords
+a spectacle of surpassing æsthetic interest, and if he is musical an
+incomparable source of wonder and delight in the quality of its sacred
+song.
+
+As far as ritual and ceremony is concerned, the practice and custom of
+the first centuries of Christianity, which were in many cases simplified
+by Rome, before they were curtailed or rejected by the Reformation, have
+been preserved intact in the East. Nothing is more false than the idea
+which often prevails in some quarters that the rites of the early Church
+were simple, and grew more and more complicated towards the Middle Ages.
+The rites of the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries were long and
+complicated, and were gradually simplified by the Latins. The proof is
+the ceremonial of the Eastern Churches, which has remained exactly where
+it was in the fourth and fifth centuries. Mass, for instance, in the
+Coptic Church, lasts five hours or longer. Low Mass, which was one of
+the simplifications introduced by Rome, is unknown in the Greek and
+Russian Churches. Every Mass is a high Mass, intoned and accompanied by
+plain song, in the presence of the faithful, and generally only on
+Sundays and holy days. The same liturgy and rite is observed by the
+Uniate Catholics, whether Greeks, Ruthenians, Poles, etc. The liturgy is
+sumptuous, and at the same time austere. There is only one altar, which
+is separated from the congregation by a large screen called the
+_iconastasis_—that is to say, the screen which bears the holy
+images—which has doors which are opened and shut during Mass, and beyond
+which the priest alone, and the Emperor when he receives Communion on
+the day of his coronation, has the right to penetrate. Behind these
+doors, which are shut before the consecration, the most solemn part of
+the Mass is consummated. No organ or any other instruments are allowed
+in the Eastern Churches, and, as in the Sistine Chapel when the Pope
+says Mass, only the human voice is heard.
+
+As far as liturgical song is concerned, the Russians have far surpassed
+the Greeks, from whom they received it. The liturgical music consists of
+plain song, and of original chants called _raspievi_, which date from
+the Middle Ages. The singing of the Church choirs in Russia is without
+comparison, the finest in the world. The bass voices reach to notes and
+attain effects resembling the 36-foot bourdon stops of a huge organ, and
+these, blent with the clear and bold treble voices of the boys, sing
+
+                 “An undisturbed song of pure concent.”
+
+The best Russian choirs sing together like one voice. They attain to
+tremendous crescendoes, to a huge volume of thunderous sound, and to a
+celestial softness and delicacy of diminishing tone. There is no finer
+chorus singing. The Russians are extremely particular and appreciative
+of religious music. Every kind of institution, including banks, has its
+private choir; and I know of a case where a banker chose his clerks
+simply and solely according to the quality of their voices, so as to
+form a choir who could sing in church.
+
+The finest choirs in Russia are those of the Emperor, St. Isaak’s
+Cathedral in St. Petersburg, of the Cathedral of the Assumption, and the
+Church of St. Saviour, and the Tchudov Monastery at Moscow; and the
+finest religious ceremonies are those which take place at Moscow during
+Holy Week and on the eve of Easter.
+
+Religious music in Russia has its roots in the heart of the people. And
+whatever in the future may be the influence of rationalistic tendencies
+and materialistic theories, of superficial indifferentism or
+ill-digested science, the Russian people at the present moment love
+their liturgy and the ceremony, ritual, and music of their worship. The
+Church still plays an overwhelming part in national life. And for the
+peasant, the Church is not only a place of mystery, sweetness, and
+consolation, but his window opens on to all that concerns the spirit—it
+is his opera, his theatre, his concert, his picture gallery, his
+library.
+
+The Russian people still flock to the shrines of the Saints, and walk
+hundreds of miles on foot to visit holy places. A peasant woman once
+asked me to lend her two roubles, as she was going on a journey. I asked
+her where she was going to, and she said, “Jerusalem.”
+
+A pilgrim in a Russian crowd is as constant a factor as a soldier, a
+student, or the member of any other profession. The churches are still
+crowded in Russia, and they have that attribute without which a Church
+is not a Church—they smell of the poor.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IX.
+                               EDUCATION.
+
+
+Education, like everything else in Russia, has, in the course of its
+existence, experienced many sharp ups and downs, which were the outcome
+in the past of the vicissitudes of history, and, in less remote times,
+of changes in the policy of successive governments.
+
+The birthplace of education in Russia was the Church. Until the Tartar
+invasion, education was entirely in the hands of the clergy; and like
+everything else in Russia, it necessarily suffered an eclipse during the
+epoch of the Tartar domination. Peter the Great created secular schools,
+sowed the seed of technical education, which was later to bear such
+abundant fruit, and planned an Academy of Sciences which was executed by
+his widow Catherine.
+
+The University of Moscow was founded in 1755, in the reign of the
+Empress Elisabeth. Catherine II. encouraged education in many ways; but
+it was not until the reign of Alexander I. that an attempt was made to
+organize a national system of education. From that time until the
+present day, education has experienced spurts of progress and relapses
+into stagnation, according as the political pendulum swung from reform
+to reaction. From 1812 to 1855 reaction was predominant. In 1855
+education, as everything else, revived under the influence of the great
+reforms. After the assassination of the Emperor Alexander II., in 1881,
+another period of reaction set in, which lasted more or less until the
+Russo-Japanese War; then came the revolutionary movement which broke
+down certain barriers, and was succeeded, as far as education is
+concerned, by a Government policy whose constant tendency has been
+towards reaction, and here as elsewhere, and in other matters, to take
+back or to curtail and limit with one hand what it had given with the
+other. But although the Government has constantly interfered with and
+hampered the organization of education, it has not only been powerless
+to withstand the great movement towards the extension and progress of
+education which is at this moment taking place in Russia, but it has in
+some cases taken the initiative in educational reform, so that if it
+curtails with one hand it has none the less given with the other; and
+the gift is more important than the limitations, because, once made, it
+opened windows that could never be shut again in spite of all possible
+curtailments. In Russia at the present moment there is a great and ever
+increasing demand for primary, secondary, technical, and higher
+education.
+
+Primary education, which in Russia is always gratuitous, is in the hands
+either of—
+
+  (_a_) The Zemstvos, in the country.
+
+        The Municipalities, in the towns.
+
+  (_b_) The Church.
+
+  (_c_) The Minister of Education, to a small extent in that part of
+          Russia where Zemstvos exist, and a large extent in the
+          ukraines where there are no Zemstvos.
+
+The course of primary education is planned on a basis of from three to
+six years. In all primary schools, reading, writing, and arithmetic, and
+religion are taught.
+
+The tendency towards a longer and slower course, because a three years’
+course, while it teaches a boy to read once and for all, has been found
+not to leave a lasting impression on him as far as writing is concerned.
+
+The boy after a three years’ course will never forget how to read, but
+he will entirely forget how to write.
+
+The primary schools are full to overflowing, and have to turn back
+pupils all over the country.
+
+As far as the teachers are concerned, 60 per cent. of them are women, 40
+per cent. are men. Only a small proportion are specially trained
+teachers; the rest, especially among the women, have merely finished
+their course at a Government Gymnasium.
+
+Of the three classes of primary schools, the best are those which are in
+the hands of the Zemstvo; then next in order of merit come those which
+are in the hands of the Minister of Education; and next the Church
+parish schools,[15] which are gradually being suspended and ousted by
+the others.
+
+All these schools were till quite lately (three or four years ago)
+supported either by the respective authorities in whose control they
+are, or by private persons. As the sums of money rendered available by
+such a system were totally insufficient to defray the necessary
+expenses, the consequence was that the general progress was slow. A
+radical change in this situation was made by an Education Bill, which
+was introduced into the Duma by the Government, and passed by the Duma a
+few years ago. This most important measure provided that the various
+authorities indicated above, which control the schools, should receive
+yearly from the Government a sum of about £40 in order to pay for the
+schooling of fifty children—that is to say, for the salary of one
+teacher for every fifty children, on the condition that the Zemstvo, or
+the other controlling authorities, as the case might be, should
+undertake to build, in a period of ten years, a number of schools
+sufficient to meet the needs of the whole population of their respective
+districts. The result of this Bill will be that in about five to six
+years’ time Russia will have enough schools for the whole of its
+population, and will be able to contemplate the practical realization of
+compulsory education.
+
+As it is now, in European Russia the percentage of people who can read
+or write is only 22·9 in Siberia, and in the Caucasus it is less (12·3
+and 12·4); but it is higher in Poland (30·5), in the Baltic provinces
+(71–80), and in certain governments, such as Moscow (40) and St.
+Petersburg (43–53).[16]
+
+Before considering the question of secondary education in Russia, it
+must be pointed out that all secondary and higher education in Russia is
+of two kinds—namely, technical and general.
+
+General secondary education is either directly in the hands of the
+Minister of Education, or in the hands of private persons under the
+close supervision of the Minister of Education. There are, as in
+Germany, two classes of general secondary education—classical, which is
+taught in the gymnasia, and non-classical, which is taught in the Real
+Schools; the gymnasia are attended by boys and girls, but the schools
+are as a rule not mixed. The Gymnasium’s course of instruction lasts
+eight years; that of the Real Schools, seven.
+
+The subjects taught in the gymnasia are as follows: Religion, Latin,
+Greek, Russian, mathematics (as far as logarithms and the binomial
+theorem, and including trigonometry), history, natural sciences, French
+or German, English (optional).
+
+The course of the Real Schools is the same, except that it excludes
+Latin and Greek, attaches much more importance to mathematics and
+natural science, and has two obligatory foreign languages (French and
+German), and one optional foreign language.
+
+The course for girls is the same in kind, but less in degree. The
+tendency for girls is to go to the Real Schools in preference to the
+gymnasia; and besides the gymnasia and the Real Schools, there are also
+for girls a certain number of institutes and gymnasia founded by the
+Empress Marie, open only to the daughters of the nobility, and to
+foundlings and orphans. These gymnasia are more or less the same as the
+ordinary Government gymnasia; the institutes are closed pensions,
+organized more or less on the lines of a French convent; the pupils are
+boarders, and the teaching of languages in these institutes is
+especially good.
+
+In the ordinary gymnasia the average number of pupils is 372, and the
+average number of pupils in each class is 35. These schools are open to
+people of every class; but this does not exclude the possibility of
+nobles or other persons founding special private schools for members of
+their particular class.
+
+In the gymnasia and Real Schools the pupils are mostly children of town
+dwellers and guild artisans; the pupils live at home, and go to the
+school only during school hours.
+
+The school terms last from September 1 until Christmas, and from
+Christmas until June 1, leaving a holiday of three months in the summer.
+
+The hours of work in school are from 9 a.m. until noon, and then, after
+an hour’s interval for lunch, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., making five hours a
+day. Preparation is done at home. There are no half-holidays. On the
+other hand, there are many whole holidays, since every saint’s day in
+Russia is a whole holiday, and besides the saints’ days there are other
+holidays as well. One point of interest, in comparing Russian secondary
+schools with English secondary schools, is that in Russian schools there
+is no such thing as corporal punishment, and if a Russian schoolboy were
+chastised or beaten by a teacher he would be almost ready to commit
+suicide from shame. In the Russian gymnasia and High Schools, the level
+and quality of the teaching are high. A university degree is required
+from all teachers, except in some rare cases in the lower classes of
+girls’ gymnasia. On paper, and theoretically, nothing could appear
+better than the system of Russian secondary education. It seems to have
+all the advantages of the German system, and at the same time to be a
+little less strenuous.
+
+Nevertheless, almost any Russian, if you ask him what is the chief
+characteristic of Russian secondary education at present, will answer
+that the education received is bad and unsatisfactory.
+
+And if you ask whether this is the result of an incomplete or faulty
+programme of instruction, or of incompetent and inadequate teaching, he
+will say, No; the scheme of instruction is sufficiently extensive and
+difficult, the teachers are well trained, competent and conscientious;
+it is in spite of this, they tell you, that the education which is the
+fruit of this laborious course is unsatisfactory, and the culture
+obtained comparatively low. If you press for the reason, they will point
+to the influence of the Government over the schools. The Government do
+not exercise an open and direct pressure on the schools, but they never
+cease from interfering indirectly with them. They exercise a kind of
+censorship over education; the teachers are being constantly checked;
+certain subjects and certain topics are tabooed; and the nature of the
+censorship varies with the changing ministers.
+
+Thus it is that education tends to be intensive in one direction and
+incomplete in another; and the net result is that the culture obtained
+is to a certain extent superficial, and that the product of the Russian
+secondary schools is a youth who is intellectually half-baked.
+
+One of the chief results of the attitude of the administration towards
+the schools is that the pupils look upon their course of education
+solely as a means of getting a diploma; they cease to be interested in
+the education itself which is provided for them, and they throw
+themselves with exaggerated vehemence into any other political or
+philosophical channel outside it—into socialism, materialism,
+theoretical and practical anarchy.
+
+This is what Russians tell you, and it is no doubt true from their point
+of view; nevertheless, if you compare the average level of secondary
+education in Russia with that which exists in England, you will notice
+at once that the average Russian, as I have said earlier in this book,
+is infinitely better instructed. I use the word “instructed” purposely;
+because if you take education in the larger sense, it is often the case
+that the more ignorant Englishman has on the whole a better balanced
+education than the over-instructed Russian. That is to say, the
+intellectually immature product of the English schools will often be
+saner and nearer to reality and practical life, and fitter to deal with
+the emergencies of life, than the intellectually overripe Russian, who
+is immature in his very overripeness; and who, by nature being
+intellectually plastic, agile, and assimilative, receives an education
+of a kind that starves him where he needs feeding, and overfeeds him
+where he needs a low diet, and leads him to seek for himself just that
+kind of intellectual food and drink which is likely to inebriate him,
+and to ruin his intellectual digestion. With regard to the course of
+education itself, he becomes simply and solely a diploma-hunter.
+
+These remarks do not apply to technical secondary education. There are
+in Russia technical secondary schools of agriculture, engineering,
+mining, forestry, and railways (all under the management of the
+different ministries). The general course of education received here is
+the same in character as that given in the gymnasia and the Real
+Schools; but it is combined with a special course, and the technical
+schools produce a type of youth who is not only more practical and
+nearer to reality, but who is more really cultivated in spite of the
+fact that the pupils of the gymnasia have the advantage of the more
+general course of education.
+
+There are also cadet schools and special schools for officers under the
+Ministry of War, which are sufficiently good; and commercial schools
+(similar to the Real Schools), under the direction of the Minister of
+Commerce.
+
+The number of schools in Russia is still not really sufficient for the
+demand; and since the regulations binding on the institution of schools
+by private persons have become less stringent, the increase in the
+number of such privately organized schools has been enormous, and this
+testifies to the greatness of the general demand for education.
+
+Higher education in Russia is also of two kinds, technical and general.
+
+General higher education is supplied by the universities. There are
+universities at Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Kharkov, Yurieff, Warsaw,
+Kazan, Odessa, Tomsk, and Saratov.
+
+The largest university is that of Moscow, where there are nearly ten
+thousand students; and that of St. Petersburg, where there are eight
+thousand. Admission to the university takes place once a year, and
+admittance is given to all students who have passed what the Germans
+call their _Abiturienten Examen_, at their secondary school—that is to
+say, their leaving-certificate examination. Besides the universities,
+there are higher technical schools, which we will come to presently.
+
+The system of university teaching is the same as that which exists in
+the rest of Europe and in Scotland; the faculties include jurisprudence,
+physics and mathematics, medicine, historical philology, Oriental
+languages, and divinity.
+
+But the part played by the universities in Russian life and the special
+character of Russian university education are unique.[17]
+
+Every Englishman who is at all interested in Russia will be probably
+aware of the immense influence that the universities have had on the
+current of modern history in Russia.
+
+The young, the adolescent in all countries, have often played a part in
+politics, whenever the politics of a country have been in a state of
+ferment. Sometimes the expression of their zeal takes the form of
+patriotism, as in the War of Liberation in Germany; sometimes, if the
+form of the Government is reactionary, it leads them to go and fight at
+the barricades.
+
+In Russia the students have always taken an interest in political
+matters; but at the beginning of the century the universities were small
+and aristocratic. Nevertheless, in 1825, secret societies existed all
+over Russia, largely recruited from the ranks of the young, and these
+finally organized an insurrection in St. Petersburg, which has become
+famous in Russian history as the Decembrist Rising; and which stands in
+contrast with all later insurrectionary risings in Russia, in that it
+was exclusively the work of the nobility and the gentry, and was
+confined to that class. The society which brought about this
+insurrection modelled itself on the German association of students, the
+_Tugendbund_; and although its practical results were nil, it left a
+tradition which the students on the one hand, and the Government on the
+other hand (although unconsciously), never permitted to die out.
+
+All through the ’forties and the ’fifties, as secondary education first
+became a fact and subsequently went on increasing, the universities grew
+not only large, but democratic, and formed a democratic nucleus; and it
+was here that the rationalistic movement which started in Western Europe
+found the most grateful soil and the quickest response. Liberal ideas
+had always flourished among the students, and this blend of liberal and
+rationalistic ideas, as soon as it began to spread and to increase, met
+with a counter-movement of repression from all successive governments.
+And it is the glory of the Russian universities that they never ceased
+to keep the flag of their ideal, their demand for political freedom,
+flying, and were always the soul of any progressive political movement.
+
+The universities were originally autonomous, and though they were
+deprived of their liberties for a time in the early part of the century,
+they retained them fully in the reign of Alexander II.; it was not until
+then that the universities came to be an important factor, since up to
+that period they had been, as I have already said, small and
+aristocratic; and it was only in the fifties that they became democratic
+and large enough to count. The privilege of autonomy which had been
+given to the universities meant that they were administered solely by a
+board of professors, at the head of which was a rector. This state of
+things lasted until the reign of Alexander III., when the universities
+were again deprived of their privileges and their autonomy, and the
+Government tried to administer them directly, with the usual result that
+trouble ensued; only the trouble brought about by the conflict of the
+Government with the universities was more turbulent in character than
+that produced by its clash with any other institutions or classes of
+society.
+
+A continual state of effervescence and of disturbance on the one hand,
+and of repression on the other, lasted until 1908, when autonomy was
+again restored to the universities; and during the next five years
+university life began, in spite of periodical strikes and closures, more
+or less to settle down; but as reaction set in, a part of its activity
+was directed against the liberties of the university. In 1911, for
+instance, all the professors in Moscow were forced to resign.
+
+At the present moment, if we do not hear of disturbances in the
+university, this can be attributed to the reaction among the students
+themselves, who are in a natural state of depression at the result of
+the revolutionary movement of 1905, which from their point of view was a
+complete failure. It may safely be said that it is most improbable that
+such a state of things will last very long, and even now there are
+unmistakable clouds on the horizon. The policy of the Government of
+giving, in educational matters, with one hand and of hampering and
+hindering with the other, was bound and is bound to result in trouble
+sooner or later. The troubles which occurred in the recent past in the
+life of the universities, during and subsequent to the revolutionary
+movement, without doubt lowered the general standard of education. The
+results obtained at present are worse than they should be, considering
+the excellence of the professors. Moreover, the constant troubles which
+arose in the life of the universities during the revolutionary period,
+caused generally by some move on the part of the Government, and
+invariably followed by repressive measures (involving temporary
+closure), drove thousands of students to seek education abroad.
+
+All that I have said about the universities applies to the higher
+technical institutes, only in a lesser degree. There is a considerable
+number of such technical institutes in Russia. St. Petersburg alone can
+boast of a Polytechnic, a Technological Institute, a Mining Institute,
+an Institute of Civil Engineers, a Higher Commercial Institute; and in
+addition to these there are institutes in other parts of Russia where
+higher education can be had in the branches of mining, railways, ways
+and communications, forestry and agronomy, besides an increasing number
+of agricultural schools all over the country. The difference between the
+character of higher technical and higher general education, between the
+higher technical schools and the universities, is the same as the
+difference between the character of the technical secondary schools and
+the general secondary schools.
+
+As in the case of technical secondary education, higher technical
+education produces a more practical type than the universities; and the
+students of the higher technical institutes only take part in politics
+when matters have reached a definite crisis, in which their action can
+have practical effect. The great importance of the universities and of
+the higher technical institute in Russia lies in the fact that they
+supply the ranks of the whole of the higher _intelligentsia_. All
+lawyers and all doctors come from the universities, and the life and the
+fate of the universities affect the cultured classes vitally. This works
+both ways. The universities affect the cultured classes, and the
+cultured classes act on the universities.
+
+For instance, every medical officer in every county council is a
+university man, and he will be vitally interested in the fate and doings
+of his _alma mater_. Any blow at any particular university will affect a
+whole class of people all over the country; the influence of the
+universities spreads like a network over the whole length and breadth of
+Russia, and produces an _esprit de corps_ and a strong spirit of
+freemasonry among the former students of the various universities.
+
+Games and physical exercise are not a feature of Russian
+education—certainly not at least in the English sense; and though
+outdoor sports, such as boating and football, have been introduced, and
+are popular in some of the universities—Odessa, for instance—it is
+impossible at present to discern even the dawn of any trend towards
+physical sports and exercise such as we have in France or Spain, for
+instance.
+
+Lately, however, an organization of gymnastical societies, under the
+supervision of Czech instructors, and in some ways resembling the German
+_Turnvereine_, have taken a firm root in the towns, and enjoy great
+popularity; these societies hold yearly festivals, and organize
+competitions between various towns. The popularity of these societies is
+likely to increase in the future.
+
+Besides the universities and schools I have mentioned, there are still a
+great many more educational institutions: veterinary institutes, schools
+of art, archæology, Oriental languages, and law; seminaries,
+ecclesiastical and naval schools, and private institutions; and at the
+top of the ladder of education there are two academies, one of art and
+one of science, consisting of professors, men of science and letters,
+who are chosen by election. Scholarships and grants to poor students are
+distributed both by the universities and the higher technical schools.
+
+If one reviews the question of Russian education as a whole, one is
+forced to the conclusion that the material both of the teacher and the
+pupil is good; the staff of teachers excellent; but that the whole
+system is continually and fundamentally vitiated by a policy, not
+exactly of repression, but of constant censorship, interference,
+checking, nagging, and hindering which saps the school life of Russia,
+and deprives it of all potential interest and vitality for the pupil. It
+is reduced to an official machine, which turns out either a specimen of
+bureaucratic mediocrity, or a rebel who reacts against it and is driven
+to anarchy and dynamite. If the Government were to leave the whole
+matter alone, there is no doubt that the schools would not only manage
+their own affairs perfectly peacefully and well themselves, but that
+they would succeed in turning out a type of youth who would be more
+really cultured than the present overripe and immature, half-baked, yet
+partially burned specimen, which is the average product of a system of
+education which cannot fail to be one-sided and unsatisfactory so long
+as it is cramped and diverted from larger channels by the exasperating
+supervision of a paternal, officious, and suspicious administration.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER X.
+                                JUSTICE.
+
+
+The judicial system of to-day in Russia dates from what is called the
+Epoch of the Great Reforms—that is, of the reforms made in 1864 by the
+Emperor Alexander II. His new judicial system is, next in order to the
+abolition of serfdom, the most important of those reforms.
+
+Up till 1864 justice in Russia dwelt behind closed doors. It was
+organized on a class basis. There was a court for the gentry, a court
+for the townsman and for such peasants as did not belong to landowners.
+Judicial decisions, civil and criminal, were based solely on documentary
+evidence prepared by the police. No oral evidence was admitted. The
+proceedings were held _in camera_. The judges appeared in public only in
+order to pass sentence or to deliver a judgment. It is needless to say
+that a system of this kind encouraged venality, partiality, and
+injustice.
+
+In reforming the old system, the Imperial Government borrowed elements
+from the judicial systems existing in France and in England, but it by
+no means confined itself to slavish imitation. The aim of the reformers
+was to reach the principles and ideas on which our system and the French
+system are based; and they created a new system founded on ideas which
+have been endorsed both in theory and in practice by modern
+civilization. The chief principles at the basis of the reformed judicial
+system in Russia are—(1) the separation of administrative and judicial
+powers; (2) the independence of the magistrate and the tribunals; (3)
+the equality of all subjects in the eye of the law (the abolition in the
+eye of the law of all class distinctions); (4) the publicity of trials;
+(5) the adoption of oral procedure; (6) the participation of the people
+in the system through (_a_) the introduction of trial by jury, (_b_)
+originally, although this was altered later, the election of judges. As
+a general principle, it can be laid down that important cases in Russia
+are tried, as they are tried elsewhere in Europe, by jury, in public and
+at the assizes; with one notable exception, that of all political
+offences and all crimes and misdemeanours committed by the Press, which
+are tried without a jury.
+
+Where the Russian system differs from the English and the French systems
+is that the judicature is divided into two sections mutually
+independent, and differing in the extent of their jurisdiction and in
+the manner in which their judges are appointed.
+
+As in many other countries, there are two branches of tribunals—firstly,
+what were actually, and what now correspond to, justices of the peace,
+dealing with petty cases; and, secondly, ordinary tribunals dealing with
+larger matters. These two branches of justice are quite distinct. They
+are parallel to each other. They are separate and isolated one from the
+other, and meet only on the top of the ladder in their common right of
+appealing to the Senate, which is the highest court of appeal.
+
+Beneath this double system of judicature, local courts exist in every
+canton: (_Volostnye Sudi_), _tribunaux de bailliage_, which were
+established when the serfs were liberated, dealing exclusively with the
+peasants’ affairs, and in which both the judges and judged are peasants.
+
+The Canton Court consists of a tribunal of three judges elected by the
+peasants. It deals with small cases, and deals with them largely
+according to established custom and tradition. It stands to reason that
+peasants will deal with matters which concern their own customs, codes,
+and idiosyncrasies far better than people of any other class.[18]
+
+The judicial system which comes next above the Canton Courts is dual:
+Petty and Grave. The Petty cases are entrusted to local justices of the
+peace, town judges, and _zemskie nachalniki_.
+
+In 1864, when the judicial system was reformed, all such cases were
+dealt with by justices of the peace, who were elected by the Zemstvo. In
+1889, the elective justices of the peace were done away with, and they
+were replaced by _zemskie nachalniki_, who, as I have already explained
+in Chapter IV., are a kind of official squire, exercising executive and
+judicial authority over the villages in their district. They are
+nominated by the governor of the province and appointed by the Minister
+of the Interior. Elective justices of the peace have survived only in
+St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, and Kharkov, and some other towns, where
+they are elected by the town assemblies for a term of three years on a
+property qualification.[19]
+
+In all other towns, and everywhere else, where there are justices of the
+peace, they are now appointed by the Minister of Justice.
+
+This rather complicated system (under which the functions of a judge
+were committed into the hands of persons (_zemskie nachalniki_) who were
+in their main attributes representative of the executive) is now to be
+abolished by a new law recently passed by the Duma, which divests the
+_zemskie nachalniki_ of their judicial functions, and replaces the
+elective justices of the peace all over the country. This new law comes
+into force in regard to ten provinces on January 1, 1914, and will be
+extended over the remaining part of the country in the course of the
+next year. The jurisdiction of the new justices of the peace has been
+increased by the new law. In civil matters they are now competent to try
+cases involving fines amounting to 1,000 roubles, and criminal offences
+carrying a sentence of simple imprisonment without any curtailment of
+civil rights. The appeal from the justices of the peace is made to the
+general meeting of the justices of the district; and from the decision
+of this meeting (_siezd_) an appeal is allowed, on points of law only,
+to the Senate. The Senate, as is shown below, may either dismiss the
+appeal or order a new trial. There is, however, no appeal to the Senate
+at all where the sentence carries with it a fine of less than 100
+roubles. The limit is now 30 roubles.
+
+In the hands, then, of the justices of the peace or of the _zemskie
+nachalniki_, as the case may be, are civil claims not exceeding 500
+roubles (£50), and criminal cases where the penalty does not exceed four
+months’ imprisonment or a fine of 300 roubles (£30). Appeals against the
+decision of a justice of the peace may be made to a bench of justices
+presided over by a justice of the peace elected by his colleagues;
+appeals against the verdicts of town judges and of the _zemskie
+nachalniki_ are heard by the District Tribunal (_Uiezdny Siezd_), a
+court—the sessions of the district—of which the marshal of the nobility
+of the district is the _ex officio_ chairman, and which consists of
+_zemskie nachalniki_ (with the exception of course of the particular
+_zemsky nachalnik_ or town judge against whose verdict the appeal is
+being made), town judges, and the so-called honorary justices of peace.
+
+Appeals against the verdict of the local courts (_Volostnye Sudi_) are
+also heard by this district tribunal.
+
+An appeal against the verdict of the District Tribunal (_Uiezdny Siezd_)
+is allowed on points of law only, and goes before a special Board called
+the _Gubernskoye Prisustvie_, consisting of the governor of the
+province, as chairman, members of the Divisional Court, and some higher
+civil servants of the province.
+
+Parallel with this branch of justice, which deals with petty cases, we
+have quite separate from it another branch which deals with more serious
+cases, and which consists of two tribunals: the Divisional Court (Court
+of Assizes), and the High Court.
+
+The Divisional Court deals with all civil cases (with the exception of
+petty cases), and roughly speaking, with all criminal cases, with the
+exception of those which concern the prosecution of officials for
+misdemeanours committed in the performance of their official duties, and
+also the great majority of political offences, which are dealt with by
+the High Court. The criminal cases which come before the Divisional
+Court can be judged by the bench only, or by the bench and a jury; but
+if the offence is such that the punishment may limit the civil rights of
+the accused, or deprive him of them altogether, the case must be tried
+before a jury. Generally speaking, all criminal cases of any importance
+are tried before a jury.
+
+The Divisional Court goes on circuit from place to place; its
+jurisdiction usually extends over five or six districts, and sometimes
+over a whole government.
+
+The Russian judicial system is the same as the French system as regards
+the nature and composition of its tribunals, its tribunals of first
+instance, its facilities for appeal, its court of high appeal
+(_Cassation_), its instruments of justice, and its method of procedure.
+The justice of the peace and the _zemsky nachalnik_ (who at present
+fulfils the duties of a justice of the peace), and the town judge
+(_Gorodskoi Sudya_),[20] are the only judges who sit alone. In all other
+tribunals there is more than one judge. Every civil or criminal case in
+Russia must be heard by three magistrates, one of whom is the president.
+
+A judge is irremovable unless he should commit a criminal offence. He
+can be transferred, but he cannot be removed. Attached to every
+Divisional Court and every High Court there is a magistrate appointed by
+the Government called the procurator (who is not irremovable, and holds
+office at the pleasure of the Minister of Justice), who corresponds to
+the French _procureur_; he is the advocate-general and public
+prosecutor. His business is to prosecute crime. But before the case
+reaches the procurator, it undergoes a preliminary investigation at the
+hands of an examining magistrate (_Sudebny Slyedovatel_) who corresponds
+to the French _Juge d’instruction_. He begins his investigation at the
+instance either of the police, or of a private individual, or of a
+plaintiff. Theoretically, the investigation was supposed to be entirely
+separate from the prosecution; but, in practice, the examining
+magistrate has become more or less a tool in the hands of the
+procurator. The examining magistrate has the right either to refer the
+result of his investigation to the procurator, or to let the case drop
+altogether, should in his opinion the grounds for further proceedings be
+insufficient.
+
+The public prosecutor (_Procurator_), on receiving the _dossier_ of the
+case from the examining magistrate (_Slyedovatel_), can either ask the
+court to drop the proceedings in view of the failure of the prosecution
+to make a case, or else he draws up a bill of indictment (_Obvinitelni
+Akt_) on which the accused has to take his trial. In the case of more
+serious offences, the bill of indictment, before it goes before the
+court, has to be confirmed by the High Court (_Sudebnaya Palata_), which
+acts as the French _Chambre de Mise en Accusation_. Civil cases do not
+go before the _procurator_, and are tried, as in France, without a jury.
+
+The procedure resembles that of a French court of justice. First of all,
+the witnesses (in criminal cases) are called, and each witness tells his
+story consecutively. He is then cross-examined by the procurator, and
+then by counsel for the prosecution and counsel for the defence.
+Cross-examination is by no means so formidable as in an English criminal
+case, because the counsel for the defence can at any moment insert a
+question amongst the questions put by the counsel for the prosecution.
+When all the witnesses have been heard, the procurator speaks for the
+prosecution. He is followed by the counsel for the plaintiff, and then
+by the counsel for the defence. After this, the procurator replies to
+the counsel for the defence, and they in their turn can reply on given
+points. The President of the Court then sums up, and puts to the jury
+the questions on which they are to give their verdict.
+
+The jury have the right of putting questions to any witness, as well as
+to the counsel for the prosecution and to the counsel for the defence.
+
+The jury consist of twelve men, “good men and true.” They are chosen
+from all classes of the population, from the whole of the inhabitants of
+the district, subject to certain conditions of age, property, domicile,
+and position. In the first place, there is a property qualification,
+which varies according to different localities. All those who fulfil the
+conditions of the law as regards the age and property qualification are
+entered on a list (_obshchy spisok_) and become liable to serve on a
+jury. From this larger list, a second narrower list (_ocheredny spisok_)
+is drawn up of the men who seem the more qualified for the work.
+
+The sifting process, of which this second list is the result, is carried
+out in every district by a Board including several officials, the
+marshal of the nobility for its Chairman. The process is repeated every
+year, and after the sifting about sixty men remain on the second list,
+out of which the jury are drawn by lot.
+
+But a property qualification is not in all cases indispensable for a
+juryman. Public servants, unless they are in the army, in the police, or
+in the magistrature, and with the exception of officials of the first
+four classes, who are exempted, can be chosen; likewise all local
+elective officers, especially peasants, such as the judges of the Canton
+Courts, the _elders_ in the commune and the cantons. The net result is
+that the jury is mixed and democratic, and as a rule contains a leaven
+of peasants and minor public servants, and sometimes, indeed, consists
+almost wholly of men from the lower classes. Here, for instance, is a
+list of the professions followed by the members of the jury before whom
+the Beiliss ritual murder case was heard at Kiev. This jury was
+exceptionally below the average of educational standard.[21]
+
+     1. Peasant, agricultural labourer.
+
+     2. Peasant, cab-driver.
+
+     3. Minor public servant employed in postal service.
+
+     4. Minor public servant employed in postal service.
+
+     5. Peasant, employed in a wine warehouse.
+
+     6. Peasant, agricultural labourer.
+
+     7. Townsman, employed at railway station.
+
+     8. Peasant, agricultural labourer.
+
+     9. Secretary at governor’s office, assistant of the revisor in the
+          auditor’s office.
+
+    10. Peasant, agricultural labourer.
+
+    11. Peasant, controller in a town tramway.
+
+    12. Burgher, small householder.
+
+The above list, whether it is below average or not—and it was said at
+the time to be startlingly below the average—shows more or less the
+nature of a Russian jury in a small town. There is generally a larger
+dose of a more educated element, but the elements which appear in this
+list will probably be present in most juries in varying quantities. It
+should be noted, however, that the composition of the lists from which
+the jury is drawn is very much in the hands of the local authorities. In
+a big town a jury exclusively composed of peasants is an exception, and
+a very rare one.
+
+Hence the peculiar character of the Russian jury, about which much has
+been written and much is being written.
+
+Its chief characteristic is its leniency, its indulgence, its tendency
+to acquit. And on this account there existed, and there still exists in
+some quarters in Russia, a movement against the jury as an institution,
+which bases its disapproval on the reluctance of the jury to condemn.
+But it is improbable that such a movement will ever have a practical
+result. The disadvantages of tampering in any way with trial by jury are
+too obvious. Many characteristic stories exist in Russian literature,
+and a still greater number float about in the flotsam and jetsam of
+current talk, illustrating by striking instances the peculiar psychology
+of the Russian jury.
+
+It is said that a jury once returned a verdict of “innocent, with
+extenuating circumstances.” Garin, the author, tells how his house was
+once set on fire by a peasant, and how without much difficulty he
+collected overwhelming evidence against a particular peasant for
+deliberate arson. The peasant was tried before a jury of peasants in the
+Canton Court. His guilt was clearly proved. Nobody had any doubt but
+that the verdict would be “guilty.” The peasants on the jury did not
+deny the prisoner’s guilt, but were of the opinion that six years’ penal
+servitude—the sentence the prisoner would have received for arson—was
+disproportionately heavy.
+
+“Two years in prison,” they reasoned—wrote the foreman, narrating the
+case to Garin—“would be enough to instil wisdom in him; but to send him
+to penal servitude is too much. In what are his wife and children
+guilty? What will they do without a bread-winner?... Their final
+argument was that it was a fine day, and the sun was shining
+spring-like; how could they ruin a man on such a fine day? They were
+sorry for the gentleman, but still more sorry for the orphans and the
+wife. Nobody was ever ruined on account of a fire. It was God’s will,
+and must be accepted as such.”
+
+“It was only afterwards,” says Garin, the sufferer in the incident, and
+the teller of the story, “that it became clear to me that what from our
+point of view may seem the greatest injustice is from the point of view
+of the people the expression of the highest justice in the world.”
+Immediately after the incident, Garin was obliged to leave the village
+where it occurred. He revisited the place two years later. “I was at
+once met,” he writes, “by a deputation of peasants, whose spokesman made
+me a kind of speech in which he said that the peasants were very glad to
+see me; and that they were very glad for my sake that the prisoner had
+been acquitted; that the Lord had not allowed me to be burdened with a
+sin, in interfering with what was not my business but God’s—the hounding
+of criminals. ‘The Lord saved thee from sin,’ they said to me; ‘all the
+good which thou didst us has remained to thee, and has not been in vain.
+The Lord punished them.’” And finally he tells how the peasants narrated
+the bad end the criminals had come to, taking it as a matter of course
+that such things belonged to the sphere of Providence, and not to that
+of man.
+
+The story is characteristic. I could quote many others of the same
+kind—stories in some cases which are startling in their unexpectedness,
+and in the difference of the point of view from that prevailing in other
+classes and in other countries. But strange as this point of view may
+seem, it will generally be found that there is in it a basis of common
+sense and an element of sound fairness. The Russian peasant juryman is
+indifferent to legal subtleties, and often quite unaffected by forensic
+evidence, which he looks on as a thing made to order, bought and sold.
+He will judge by his conscience, and according to his own code of
+morals, which, if indulgent, is none the less definite.
+
+A friend of mine was once serving on a jury in St. Petersburg. The
+prisoner was found guilty of an odious crime, but the jury agreed to a
+verdict of “guilty, with extenuating circumstances.” My friend asked one
+man, who was a peasant, how there could be extenuating circumstances in
+such a case, to which he answered, “I am not quite sure he did it.” If
+the principle be a just one, that it is better that a guilty man should
+go free than that an innocent man should be condemned, then the chief
+accusation made against the characteristics of the Russian jury breaks
+down. A Russian jury will be almost certain to give the prisoner the
+benefit of the doubt. When the ritual murder case began at Kiev, it was
+pointed out with dismay in several quarters that it was absurd to try
+such a case before an uneducated jury—that a jury of that kind could not
+possibly appreciate complicated questions of medical _expertise_, and
+all the arcana of folklore and talmudic tradition and interpretations of
+Hebrew texts, which played a large part in the trial. But when the trial
+was over, those who interviewed the jurymen said that the jury had paid
+no attention to all that; the visit to the site where the body was found
+was the first thing which affected their opinion; the eloquence of the
+able lawyers engaged on both sides did not influence them, as they said
+lawyers were “hired”; but the conduct of one of the jury, who spent a
+large part of his time in prayer, impressed them; and finally they gave
+a verdict of “not guilty,” which was the result of the workings of their
+conscience.
+
+This is all the more remarkable in that they very probably took the
+existence of ritual murders as a matter of course; but however this may
+have been, they realized that they had to find Beiliss guilty or not
+guilty, and they found him not guilty. A jury chosen from the most
+cultivated classes of Russia could not have shown more sense, and—as
+this case had raised political questions and racial passions just as the
+Dreyfus case did—had such a jury been infected by partisanship or
+political or religious fanaticism, it is quite possible that things
+might not have gone so well for the accused. For whereas the jury thus
+constituted might have been liberal, it might just as well have been
+reactionary and anti-Semite. Of course the Russian jury has its
+drawbacks—it may, if consisting of the lower classes, very likely look
+upon certain forms of fraud as rather a good joke; it may be
+over-indulgent to certain crimes; but if the principle I mentioned just
+now is sound, that it is better for the guilty to escape than that the
+innocent should suffer, then these drawbacks are amply compensated for.
+
+There is another point to remember: by heightening the educational
+average of a Russian jury, you would probably increase rather than
+diminish its leniency; because this leniency is due to a great extent to
+the inborn indulgence, tolerance, and humaneness of the Russian people.
+
+Juries drawn exclusively from the _intelligentsia_ are said to be still
+more indulgent than peasant juries. Opinions differ on this point. A
+Russian friend of mine tells me he believes the peasant jury the more
+tolerant, in spite of what he has heard, and in spite of his own
+experience to the contrary; but it is probably a question of the nature
+of the crime—the _intelligentsia_ being more severe for certain crimes
+which the peasants would condone as quite natural (say, certain forms of
+forgery and violence), and the peasants, on the other hand, dealing
+severely with a crime towards which the _intelligentsia_ would be more
+leniently disposed. But the main point is that a Russian jury, whatever
+its composition, is fundamentally indulgent. It is far more indulgent
+than a jury chosen from any other European country. I remember being in
+St. Petersburg just after the Crippen case, and hearing it discussed
+among educated people in reactionary circles. These people could not
+understand how it was possible to hang a man on such slender evidence.
+Even if the evidence had been abundant, the punishment seemed to them
+too severe, but on slender evidence the sentence seemed to them
+monstrous.
+
+This leads us to the question of the punishments which the Russian law
+can inflict.
+
+The death penalty exists only for attempts on the life of the Emperor or
+members of the imperial family, forcible attempts to dethrone the
+Emperor, and certain cases of high treason.
+
+The death penalty was abolished by the Empress Elisabeth in 1753. It is
+true that when this was done it was rather the name than anything else
+which was abolished, since as long as flogging continued with the
+_knut_[22], a leather whip which was as deadly as the cat-of-nine-tails,
+a sentence of over thirty blows (thirty-five blows was the maximum
+allowed during the last years of flogging) was enough to prove fatal.
+
+Flogging with the _knut_ was abolished by the Emperor Nicholas I. during
+the first year of his reign (1825). During the reign of Alexander II.,
+from 1855 to 1876, only one man was executed on the scaffold—Karakosov,
+who made an attempt on the Emperor’s life. From 1866 to 1903 only 114
+men suffered the penalty of death throughout the Russian empire. These
+statistics were read out and discussed in the Council of Empire in July
+1906 by M. Tagantsev, a celebrated Russian legist, who pointed out that,
+in contradistinction to this leniency, during 1906, from January to
+June, 108 people had been condemned to death under martial law, and
+ninety had been executed, not counting those who had been killed without
+trial.
+
+When the Duma was dissolved in July 1906, and P. A. Stolypin took the
+reins of government in his hands, martial law continued; drum-head
+courts-martial were held all over the country, and the number of people
+executed during 1907 and 1908 was very great.
+
+But it must be remembered that during this period the country was in a
+state of anarchy. Acts of terrorism were being committed almost daily by
+the social-revolutionary party, and acts of hooliganism and robbery
+under arms by the criminal classes, who imitated and adopted the methods
+of the revolutionaries. A vicious circle of lawless crime and
+indiscriminate retaliation seemed to have closed round Russian life, so
+that during all this period the executions were to the crimes in a
+proportion of about one to three. It should also be remembered that
+during certain phases of this epoch many parts of the country were
+virtually in a state of civil war.
+
+In any case, whether Stolypin’s policy was defensible or not—and
+theoretically it was indefensible—he was successful with the help of the
+reaction that came about in public opinion in putting an end to the
+anarchy, and after a time things began to quiet down; drum-head
+courtmartial ceased, martial law gave way to “states of reinforced
+protection,” and the country gradually gained its normal state, and
+capital punishment has once more become rarer, although it cannot yet be
+said to be non-existent, since, in virtue of states of reinforced
+protection (_Ysilenaya Okhrana_), and by military courts, during 1912,
+335 people were condemned to death, and 124 were executed.
+
+In 1913, 148 were sentenced and 33 were executed (the large number of
+persons reprieved being due during this year to an amnesty given on the
+occasion of the tercentenary of the imperial family). The majority of
+crimes for which sentences of death were passed are evasion from
+prisons, riots in prison, or attacks on prison authorities.
+
+The criminal penalties meted out by Russian law are:—
+
+  (_a_) Penal servitude for life, or for terms ranging from four years
+          to twenty years.
+
+  (_b_) Imprisonment from four to six years with consequent loss of
+          civil rights.
+
+  (_c_) Deportation to remote parts of the empire for settlement.
+
+Formerly all convicts were deported, but now some of them serve their
+terms in prisons in the local Russian provinces.
+
+Besides these criminal penalties, there exist also what are called
+corrective penalties, which include various degrees of punishment,
+ranging from reprimands, fines, and imprisonment from three days to
+three months, at the bottom of the scale, to sentences of one to four
+years with loss of civil privileges at the top of the scale. Among these
+corrective penalties is what is called fortress imprisonment for one
+year four months to four years with loss of rights, and imprisonments
+for four weeks to one year four months without loss of rights. This
+punishment is usually applied to delinquencies of a political or of a
+literary character.
+
+Certain crimes are far less severely punished in Russia than they are in
+England. A murderer, for instance, as a rule will receive a sentence of
+twelve years’ penal servitude. In some cases, if there are extenuating
+circumstances, if he acted under provocation, he will probably be
+acquitted altogether. Again, there are cases of murder which have been
+punished by not more than two years’ imprisonment.
+
+Had Beiliss been found guilty he would not have been hanged—as was
+stated in some of the London newspapers—but the maximum sentence he
+could have received (for murder of a child accompanied by violence)
+would have been penal servitude for life.
+
+We have seen that there are in Russia two tribunals—the Divisional Court
+and the High Court, and that the High Court deals chiefly with political
+offences, or with the delinquencies of officials. Cases heard by the
+High Court are tried either by the Bench, or by a special tribunal
+consisting of judges and what are called “class representatives.” These
+consist of the marshal of the nobility of the government, a mayor from
+the town, and the elder of the canton (a peasant). Appeals against
+verdicts of the Divisional Court in cases which were tried without a
+jury can be made to the High Court, which can modify the sentence, and a
+final appeal can be made to the Senate. In cases which are tried by a
+jury no appeal can be made on points of fact; but an appeal can be made
+on points of law to the Senate, which can either confirm the sentence,
+or order the case to be retried either before the same tribunal, or
+before a tribunal exercising a similar jurisdiction. The verdict in
+cases tried by jury cannot therefore be modified, but it can be
+cancelled and quashed.
+
+The Senate in these cases corresponds to the French _Cour de Cassation_.
+
+The Russian Bar came into existence as a profession in 1864. Any one of
+a certain education and standing is admitted to plead in a criminal case
+in Russia, unless the case be political. As regards civil cases, the
+privilege is limited to the right of appearing before a petty tribunal
+three times a year. This is an exception to the rule that in a civil
+case only sworn advocates or “private attorneys”[23] are entitled to
+plead. Professional lawyers receive their training at the university,
+and when, by passing the necessary examination, they are in possession
+of a certificate or degree, they are obliged to pass through a
+preliminary stage of five years’ “deviling”; then after a formal
+examination in legal procedure, they become full-blown “sworn lawyers”
+(_prisiazhnye povierenye_).
+
+The Russian Bar has more than justified its existence. Since it came
+into being in 1864 it has produced a number of most remarkable men,
+remarkable as lawyers as well as orators. Lately, since the creation of
+the Duma, its influence has made itself felt in politics, since many of
+the members of the Duma who have played a leading part in politics have
+been lawyers. The lawyers naturally had the habit of speech, and were
+often trained orators, so that as soon as an opportunity arose for their
+peculiar gifts to have free play, they were bound to come to the front
+on both sides of the House. Among the members of the Duma who have
+attained to prominence are such men as Plevako, Maklakov, and that of
+the late M. Muromtsev, the president of the first Duma, who was one of
+the most celebrated lawyers of the University of Moscow, and one of the
+brightest ornaments of the Russian Civil Bar.
+
+Generally speaking, of all the reforms carried out by Alexander II.,
+that of the judicial system—leaving out of account the emancipation of
+the serfs, which was the _sine qua non_ of all reform, and without which
+all other reforms were useless—was the most greatly acclaimed. In the
+first place, because the old system of justice had been so bad; and in
+the second place, because the new system proved to be a real success.
+
+During the period of reaction which set in in the reign of Alexander
+III., and during the first years of the reign of the present Emperor,
+under the reactionary administration of Plehve, the Bar still retained
+its independence; and during this time, it was at the Bar, and at the
+Bar only, that independence of thought and speech could be said to
+exist.
+
+It must be said that the revolutionary movement had a bad effect on it:
+firstly, because many of its Liberal members were suspended; and
+secondly because the Government, after the revolutionary movement, did
+everything it could to diminish the moral independence of the judges,
+and to make them as reactionary as possible, and in some respects this
+was successful. The result of this policy is being felt now in political
+or semi-political cases. But this is probably only a transitional and
+temporary state of reaction, following on the disturbance of the
+revolutionary movement, and it will remedy itself automatically in the
+course of time, if the quiet state of things that now exists continues;
+but if this proves not to be the case, if the sparks of discontent
+suddenly burst into flame, then circumstances of a different kind will
+restore to the Bar its ancient independence. Yet as things are now, and
+taking all drawbacks, all temporary embarrassments and hindrances, and
+all reactionary influences into account; with every disadvantage under
+which it may be labouring, the Russian Bar must still be acknowledged an
+admirable institution of which any country should feel justly proud.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XI.
+                       THE FASCINATION OF RUSSIA.
+
+
+Gogol, the greatest of Russian humorists, has a passage in one of his
+books, where in exile he cries out to his country to reveal the secret
+of her fascination.
+
+“What is the mysterious and inscrutable power which lies hidden in you?”
+he exclaims. “Why does your aching and melancholy song echo unceasingly
+in one’s ears? Russia, what do you want of me? What is there between you
+and me?” This question has often been repeated, not only by Russians in
+exile, but by foreigners who have lived in Russia.
+
+The country is so devoid of the more obvious and unmistakable signs of
+glamour and attraction. As Gogol says, not here are those astonishing
+miracles of nature which are made still more startling by the triumphs
+of art.
+
+In Russia there are no
+
+                   “Congesta manu prœruptis oppida saxis,
+               Fluminaque antiquos subterlabentia muros”;
+
+no
+
+                          “old palaces and towers
+              Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
+              All overgrown with azure moss and flowers”;
+
+no “noble wreck in ruinous perfection,” where “the stars twinkle through
+the loops of time”; no “castle, precipice-encurled in a gash of the
+wind-grieved Apennine”; no “rose-red city half as old as time.”
+
+There are none of those spots where nature, art, time, and history have
+combined to catch the heart with a charm in which beauty, association,
+and even decay are indistinguishably mingled; where art has added the
+picturesque to the beauty of nature; and where time has made magic the
+handiwork of art; and where history has peopled the spot with countless
+phantoms, and cast over everything the strangeness and the glamour of
+her spell.
+
+Such places you will find in France and in England, all over Italy, in
+Spain, and in Greece, but not in Russia. Russia is a country of
+colonists, where life has been a continual struggle against the rigour
+and asperity of the climate, and whose political history is the record
+of a long and desperate struggle against adverse circumstances; whose
+oldest city was sacked and burnt just at the moment when it was
+beginning to flourish; whose first capital was destroyed by fire in
+1812; whose second capital dates from the seventeenth century; whose
+stone houses are rare in the country, and whose wooden houses are
+perpetually being destroyed by fire.
+
+A country of long winters and fierce summers, of rolling plains,
+uninterrupted by mountains and unvariegated by valleys.
+
+And yet the charm is there. It is a fact which is felt by quantities of
+people of different nationalities and races; and it is difficult, if you
+live in Russia, to escape it, and once you have felt it you will never
+be free from it. The aching, melancholy song, which Gogol says wanders
+from sea to sea throughout the length and breadth of the land, will for
+ever echo in your heart, and haunt the recesses of your memory.
+
+It is impossible to analyze charm, for if charm could be analyzed it
+would cease to exist; and it is difficult to define the charm which is
+attached to places where there is so little of that startlingly obvious
+beauty of nature or art whose appeal is instantaneous; where there is no
+playground of romance, and no abodes haunted by poetic or historical
+ghosts and echoes.
+
+But to those who have never been to Russia, and who will perhaps never
+go there, Turgeniev’s descriptions of the country will give an idea of
+this unique and peculiar magic. For instance, the description of the
+summer night, when on the plain the children tell each other bogey
+stories; or the description of that other July evening, when out of the
+twilight from a long way off on the plain, a child’s voice is heard
+calling, “Antropka-a-a,” and Antropka answers, “Wha-a-a-a-a-at”; and far
+away out of the immensity comes the answering voice, “Come ho-ome;
+because daddy wants to whip you.”
+
+Turgeniev will afford to those who wish to travel in their armchair
+magical glimpses of just those particular episodes, pictures, incidents,
+sayings and doings, touches of human nature, phases of landscape, shades
+of atmosphere, which constitute the charm of Russian life.
+
+Whereas those who will actually travel in Russia itself will recognize
+not only that what he writes is true to nature, but that incidents such
+as those he records and causes to live again by means of his
+incomparable art are a frequent and common experience to those who have
+eyes to see.
+
+The picturesqueness peculiar to countries rich in a long tradition of
+art, and in varied and conflicting historical associations, may be
+absent in Russia; but this does not mean that beauty is absent, and its
+manifestations are often all the more striking from their lack of
+obviousness.
+
+I was favoured with such a glimpse this summer. I was staying in a small
+wooden house in Central Russia, not far from a railway, but isolated
+from all other houses, and at a fair distance from a village. The
+harvest was nearly done. The heat was sweltering. Everything was parched
+and dry. The walls and ceilings were black with flies. One had no wish
+to venture out of doors until the evening.
+
+The small garden of the house, which was gay with asters and sweet peas,
+was surrounded by birch trees, with here and there a fir tree in their
+midst.
+
+Opposite the little house a broad pathway, flanked on each side by a row
+of tall birch trees, lead to the margin of the garden, which ended in a
+rather steep grass slope, and a valley, or rather a dip, likewise
+wooded, and on the other side of the dip, on a level with the garden,
+there was a pathway half hidden by trees; so that from the house, if you
+looked straight in front of you, you saw a broad path, with birch trees
+on each side of it, forming as it were a proscenium for a distant view
+of trees; and if anybody walked along the pathway on the other side of
+the dip, although you saw no road, you could see their figures in
+outline against the sky, as though they were walking across the back of
+a stage.
+
+Just as the cool of the evening began to fall, out of the distance came
+a rhythmical song, very high, and ending on a note that seemed to last
+for ever, piercingly clear and clean. Then the music came a little
+nearer, and one could distinguish first a solo chanting a phrase, and
+then a chorus taking it up, and finally, solo and chorus became one,
+reaching a climax on one high note, which went on and on, getting purer
+and stronger, without any seeming effort, until it eventually died away.
+
+The tone of the voices was so high, so pure, and at the same time so
+peculiar, so strong and unusual, that it was difficult at first to
+decide whether the voices were high tenor men’s voices, womanly
+sopranos, or boyish trebles. They were quite unlike, both in range and
+quality, the voices of women you usually hear in Russian villages. The
+music drew nearer, and it filled the air with a stateliness and a calm
+indescribable. And presently, in the distance, beyond the dip between
+the trees, and in the centre of the natural stage made by the garden, I
+saw against the sky figures of women walking slowly in the sunset, and
+singing as they walked, carrying their scythes and their wooden rakes
+with them; and once again the high, pure phrase began, to be repeated by
+the chorus; and once again chorus and solo melted together in a high and
+infinitely long-drawn-out note, which seemed to swell like the sound of
+some crystal clarion, to grow purer and more single, and to go on and
+on, until it ended suddenly and sharply, like a frieze ends. And this
+song seemed to proclaim rest after toil, and satisfaction for labour
+accomplished. It was like a hymn of praise, a broad benediction, a grace
+sung for the end of the day, the end of the summer, the end of the
+harvest. It seemed the very soul and spirit of the breathless August
+evening.
+
+Slowly the women walked past and disappeared into the trees once more.
+The glimpse was but momentary, yet it sufficed to conjure up a whole
+train of thoughts and pictures of rites, ritual, and custom—of pagan
+ceremonies older than the gods, of rustic worship and rural festival
+older than all creeds. And as another verse of what sounded like a
+primeval harvest hymn began, the brief vision of the reapers, erect,
+stately, full of dignity, sacerdotal and majestic in the dress and with
+the attributes of toil, added to the impression made by the high quality
+and pure concent of the singing, and one felt as if one had had a vision
+of another phase of time, a glimpse into an older and remoter
+world—older than Virgil, older than Romulus, older than Demeter—a world
+where the spring, the summer, and the autumn, harvest time and sowing,
+the gathering of fruits, and the vintage, were the gods; a gleam from
+the golden age, a breath from the morning and the springtide of the
+world.
+
+The place seemed to become a temple in the quiet light of the
+evening—august, sacred, and calm—and the procession of those stately
+figures, diminutive in the distance, was like the design on an archaic
+vase or frieze; and the music seemed to seal a sacrament, to be the
+initiation into some immemorial secret, into some far-off mystery—who
+knows, perhaps the Mystery of Eleusis?—or older mysteries, of which
+Eleusis was but the far-distant offspring? The music passed, the singing
+died away in the distance, and one felt inclined to say,—
+
+                “Is it a vision or a waking dream?
+                Fled is that music—do I wake or sleep?”
+
+When I say that the singing evoked thoughts of Greece, the thing is less
+fantastic than it seems. In the first place, in the songs of the Russian
+peasants the Greek modes are still in use—the Dorian, the Hypo-dorian,
+the Lydian, the Hypo-phrygian. “_La musique, telle qu’elle était
+pratiquée en Russie au moyen âge_” (writes M. Soubier in his _History of
+Russian Music_), “_tenait à la tradition des religions et des mœurs
+paiennes._” And in the secular as well as in the ecclesiastical music of
+Russia there is an element of influence which is purely Hellenic.
+
+It turned out that the particular singers I heard on that evening were
+not local singers, but a guild of women reapers who had come from the
+government of Tula to work during the harvest. Their singing, although
+the form and kind of song was familiar to me, was quite different in
+quality from any that I had heard before; and the impression made by it
+is unforgettable.
+
+If the aspect of nature in Russia is, broadly speaking, monotonous and
+uniform, this does not mean that beauty manifests itself infrequently.
+Not only magic moments occur in the most unpromising surroundings, but
+beauty is to be found in Russian nature and landscape at all times and
+all seasons in a multitude of shapes.
+
+Personally I know nothing more striking than a long drive in the evening
+twilight at harvest time over the immense hedgeless rolling fields in
+Russia, through stretches of golden wheat and rye variegated with
+millet, still green and not yet turned to the bronze colour it takes
+later; when you drive for miles over monotonous and yet ever-varying
+rolling fields, and when you see the cranes, settling for a moment, and
+then flying off into space.
+
+Later in the twilight, great continents of dovelike lilac clouds float
+in the east, and the west is suffused with the dusty and golden
+afterglow of the sunset, and the half-reaped corn and the spaces of
+stubble are burnished and glow in the heat, and smouldering fires of
+weeds burn here and there; and as you reach a homestead you will perhaps
+see by the threshing machine a crowd of dark men and women still at
+their work, and in the glow from the flame of a wooden fire and the
+shadow of the dusk, in the smoke of the engine and the dust of the
+chaff, they have a Rembrandt-like power; and the feeling of space,
+breadth, and air and immensity grows upon one; and the earth seems to
+grow larger, and the sky to grow deeper, and the spirit is lifted,
+stretched, and magnified.
+
+The Russian poets have celebrated more frequently the spring and
+winter—the brief spring with the intense green of the birch trees, the
+uncrumpling fern, the woods carpeted with lilies of the valley, the
+lilac bushes, and the nightingale, which in Russia is the bird of
+spring, later the briar, which flowers in great profusion; and the
+winter with its fields of snow scintillating in the sunshine, when the
+transparent woods are black against the whiteness, or, when covered with
+snow and frozen, they form an enchanted fabric, a fantastic tracery of
+powdered shapes, gleaming against the stainless blue, or when, after a
+night of thaw, the brown branches emerge once more covered with airy
+threads and drops of sparkling dew.
+
+Wonderful, too, is the sunset and twilight of the winter evening after
+the first snow has fallen in December, when the new moon rises above and
+is poised, like a silver sail, or a gem, in a sea of azure that is
+suffused, as it grows nearer the earth, with a rosy blush. The white
+rays of the new moon looking down from the sky flood the sheets of snow
+with radiance, and lend them an intenser purity; and lastly, with a
+tinge of cold blue in their whiteness, they show up in bold relief the
+wooden houses, the red roofs, and all the furniture of toil; and these
+practical and prosaic household things—these objects and attributes of
+everyday life—assume a strange largeness and darkness as they loom
+between the snow and the faintly blushing and lustrous sky, as unreal
+and portentous as the conjured visions of a magician.
+
+The beauty and exhilaration of winter has been well sung by the Russian
+poets, and the long drives in sledges under a leaden sky, to the
+monotonous tinkle of the sledge bell, and the whistling blizzard with
+its demons that lead the horses astray in the night; and as for the
+spring, whose invasion after the melting of the snows is so sudden,
+whose green robes are so startling in their intensity, and whose
+conquest of nature is so sudden and so swift, it has evoked some of the
+finest pages of Russian literature, in prose as well as in verse.
+
+But there will be some who will enjoy more than anything in Russia the
+summer afternoons on some river, where the flat banks are covered with
+oak trees, ash, and willow, and thick undergrowth, and where every now
+and then perch rise to the surface to catch flies, and the kingfishers
+skim over the surface from reach to reach. Perhaps you will take a boat
+and row past islands of rushes, and a network of waterlilies, to where
+the river broadens, and you reach a great sheet of water flanked by a
+weir and a mill. The trees are reflected in the glassy surface, and
+nothing breaks the stillness but the grumbling of the mill and the cries
+of the children bathing.
+
+And then, if you are near a village, all through the summer night you
+will hear song answering song, and the brisk rhythm of the accordion; or
+to the interminable humming, buzzing burden of the three-stringed
+_balalaika_, verse will succeed to verse of an apparently tireless song,
+and the end of each verse will seem to beget another and give a keener
+zest to the next; and the song will go on and on, as if the singer were
+intoxicated by the sound of his own music.
+
+But the peculiar manifestations of the beauty of nature in a flat and
+uniform country are not enough to account for the overwhelming
+fascination of Russia. That is a part of it, but that is not all. And
+against that in the other scale you must put dirt, squalor, misery,
+slovenliness, disorder, and uninspiring wooden provincial towns, the
+dusty or sodden roads, the frequent gray skies, the long and heavy
+sameness.
+
+The _advocatus diaboli_ has a strong case. He could, and often does,
+draw up an indictment proving to you that Russia is a country with a
+disagreeable climate—an arid summer producing uncertain harvests which
+sometimes result in starvation, an intolerably long winter, a damp and
+unhealthy spring, and a still more unhealthy autumn: a country whose
+capital is built on a swamp, where there are next to no decent roads,
+where the provincial towns are overgrown villages, squalid, squatting,
+dismal, devoid of natural beauty, and unredeemed by art: a country where
+internal communications off the big railway lines are complicated and
+bad; where on the best lines accidents happen owing to sleepers being
+rotten; where the cost of living is high, and the expense of life out of
+all proportion to the quality of the goods supplied; where labour is
+dear, bad, and slow; where the sanitary conditions in which the great
+mass of the population live are deplorable; where every kind of disease,
+including plague, is rampant; where medical aid and appliances are
+inadequate; where the poor people are backward and ignorant, and the
+middle class slack and slovenly; and where progress is deliberately
+checked and impeded in every possible way: a country governed by chance,
+where all forms of administration are arbitrary, uncertain, and
+dilatory; where all forms of business are cumbersome and burdened with
+red tape; and where bribery is an indispensable factor in business and
+administrative life: a country burdened by a vast official population,
+which is on the whole lazy, venal, and incompetent: a country where
+political liberty and the elementary rights of citizenship do not exist;
+where even the programmes of concerts, and all foreign newspapers and
+literature, are censored; where the freedom of the Press is hampered by
+petty annoyances, and editors are constantly fined and sometimes
+imprisoned; where freedom of conscience is hampered; a country where the
+only political argument which can be used by a private person is
+dynamite, and where political assassination is the only form of civic
+courage: a country of misrule: a country where there is every licence
+and no law; where everybody acts regardless of his neighbour; where you
+can do everything and criticize nothing; and where the only way to show
+you have the courage of your convictions is to spend years in prison: a
+country of extremes, of moral laxity, and extravagant self-indulgence; a
+people without self-control and without discipline; always finding
+fault, always criticizing, but never acting; jealous of anything or
+anybody who emerges from the ranks and rises superior to the average;
+looking upon all individual originality and distinction with suspicion;
+a people slavish to the dead level of mediocrity and the stereotyped
+bureaucratic pattern; a people which has all the faults of the Orient
+and none of its austerer virtues, and none of its dignity and
+self-control; a nation of ineffectual rebels under the direction of a
+band of time-serving officials: a country where those in power are in
+perpetual fear, and where influence may come from any quarter—where
+nothing is too absurd to happen: a country, as was said in the Duma, of
+unlimited possibilities. I do not think the _advocatus diaboli_ can put
+the case stronger than that. He would call as his witnesses the greatest
+Russian writers of the past, and the most prominent Russians of the
+present in political life, art, literature, and science. He would call
+countless moralists and satirists, and prove that the Russian God is the
+God of all that is topsy-turvy, and of everything which is in its wrong
+place and as it should not be. And he would laugh at all the reformers,
+and tell them to reform themselves; and he would end his indictment with
+a smile, and murmur, “_Doux pays!_” Of course the case of the _advocatus
+diaboli_ is as unfair as possible, otherwise it would not be the case of
+the _advocatus diaboli_. And the defence could make a strong
+counter-case refuting some of these statements, qualifying all of them.
+
+But the defence can do better than that. It can point out that the very
+strength of the case of the _advocatus diaboli_ constitutes its
+weakness; because if you say to him: “I know all that, and you can make
+your case still stronger, if you choose. I admit all that; and in spite
+of all, and in some cases even because of it, Russia has for me an
+indescribable fascination; in spite of all that, I love the country, and
+admire and respect its people.”
+
+What can he answer to that? Nothing, I think. If you admit the faults,
+and add that they seem to you the negative results of positive qualities
+so valuable as to outweigh them altogether, the case of the _advocatus
+diaboli_ breaks down altogether. That is my point of view about Russia.
+I perceive countless faults and drawbacks, some which may be the
+fortuitous result of bad government, and only temporary, and which will
+disappear, as other worse things have already disappeared, with the
+march of time; and others which may be innate and radical—the result of
+original sin, and the way in which the Russian character expresses its
+indispensable dose of original sin, and inseparable from it and
+ineradicable. There may be many more which I do not even perceive. But
+this does not affect me, because I have realized and experienced the
+result of other qualities and virtues which seem to me greater and more
+important than all the possible faults put together, and magnified to
+any extent; and the net result of this is that the country has for me an
+overpowering charm, and the people an indescribable attraction.
+
+And the charm exercised by the country as a whole is partly due to the
+country itself, and partly to the mode of life lived there, and to the
+nature of the people. The qualities that do exist, and whose benefit I
+have experienced, seem to me the most precious of all qualities; and the
+virtues the most important of all virtues; and the glimpses of beauty
+the rarest in kind; the songs and the music the most haunting and most
+heart-searching; the poetry nearest to nature and man; the human charity
+nearest to God.
+
+This is perhaps the secret of the whole matter, that the Russian soul is
+filled with a human Christian charity which is warmer in kind and
+intenser in degree, and expressed with a greater simplicity and
+sincerity, than I have met with in any other people anywhere else; and
+it is this quality being behind everything else which gives charm to
+Russian life, however squalid the circumstances of it may be, which
+gives poignancy to its music, sincerity and simplicity to its religion,
+manners, intercourse, music, singing, verse, art, acting—in a word, to
+its art, its life, and its faith.
+
+Never did I realize this so much as once when I was driving on a cold
+and damp December evening in St. Petersburg in a cab. It was dark, and I
+was driving along the quays from one end of the town to the other. For a
+long time I drove in silence, but after a while I happened to make some
+remark to the cabman about the weather. He answered gloomily that the
+weather was bad and everything else too. For some time we drove on again
+in silence, and then some other stray remark or question of mine
+elicited from him the fact that he had had bad luck that day in the
+matter of a fine. The matter was a trivial one, but somehow or other my
+interest was half aroused, and I got him to tell me the story, which was
+a case of ordinary bad luck and nothing very serious; but when he had
+told it, he gave such a profound sigh that I asked whether it was that
+which was still weighing upon him. Then he said “No,” and slowly began
+to tell me a story of a great catastrophe which had just befallen him.
+He possessed a little land and a cottage in the country not far from St.
+Petersburg. His house had been burnt. It was true he had insured, but
+the insurance was not sufficient to make any sensible difference. He had
+two sons, one of whom went to school, and one who had some employment
+somewhere in the provinces. The catastrophe of the fire had simply upset
+everything. All his belongings had perished. He could no longer send his
+boy to school. His other son, who was in the country, had written to say
+he was engaged to be married, and had asked his consent, advice, and
+approval. “He has written twice,” said the cabman, “and I keep silence
+(_i ya molchu_). What can I answer?” I cannot give any idea of the
+strength, simplicity, and poignancy of the tale as it came, hammered out
+slowly, with pauses between each sentence, and a kind of biblical and
+dignified simplicity of utterance and purity of idiom which is the
+precious privilege of the poor in Russia. The words seemed to be torn
+out from the bottom of his heart. He made no complaint; there was no
+grievance, no whine in the story. He just stated the bald facts with a
+simplicity which was overwhelming. And in spite of all, his faith in
+God, and his consent to the will of Providence, was unshaken, certain,
+and sublime. This was three years ago. I have forgotten the details of
+the story, which were many; but the impression remains of having been
+face to face with a human soul, stripped and naked, and a human soul in
+the grip of a tragedy, as dignified as that of Prometheus, as touching
+as that of King Lear, and as full of faith as that of Job. And this
+experience, which brought one in touch with the divine, is one which, I
+submit, could only in such circumstances occur in Russia.
+
+When I say that for me Russia has a unique and overwhelming charm, I
+mean that for me this charm arises from my love of the Russian people;
+and this love is not a predilection for the curious, the picturesque,
+the remote, and the unusual, but the expression, the homage, the
+acknowledgment, the admiration of those qualities which I believe to be
+the “captain jewels” in the crown of human nature.
+
+“Those foreigners,” wrote a Russian journalist not long ago, “who come
+to Russia and rave about the people, nevertheless in their hearts
+despise us. They admire in us qualities which they regard as primeval
+and barbarian; they look upon us as good-natured and pleasant savages.”
+I should like to assure that writer, or any other Russian who chances to
+read these pages, that, whatever people may think, what I love and
+admire in the Russian people is nothing barbaric, picturesque, or
+exotic, but something eternal, universal, and great—namely, their love
+of man and their faith in God. And this seems to me of a kind and of a
+degree that makes all dissection of vices and enumeration of failings,
+all carping criticism and captious analysis, an idle business. It may be
+a profitable employment for the Russians to blame and to criticize
+themselves, and it is one in which they are constantly occupied. It is
+less important in the case of a foreigner writing for foreigners, and on
+a country about which much prejudice has existed in the past and many
+falsehoods have been written; for him it is important to recognize and
+to point out the sunshine of which his countrymen are ignorant, and not
+to analyze the spots on the sun. For it is the people who admire whose
+observation is profitable, and it is those who see and feel the sunshine
+who feel and see the truth; for the sunshine and not the sun-spots is
+the important fact about the sun.
+
+Nevertheless, the expression of an admiration for certain qualities in a
+foreign people is always a delicate task. And often foreigners are
+justly irritated for being praised for the qualities which they least
+want to be praised for. Nothing is more irritating than the
+condescending tone which some people adopt in praising certain elements
+which meet with their approval in foreign countries. When, for instance,
+Anglo-Saxons say to the Latin races: “Keep to your past; keep to your
+superstitions, your relics, your ruins, and your associations; remain
+artistic and picturesque; but keep your hands off battleships,
+aeroplanes, telephones, tramcars, and steam ploughs; leave those
+practical things to us. You cannot deal with them. You are charming as
+you are. Do not try to be modern, you spoil the whole effect by doing
+so.” This is often the attitude of people to the Spaniards and the
+Italians, and it is a maddening attitude. Or to the Irish they say: “You
+are amusing, why should you be competent? Why should you try and deal
+with the serious business of politics?” And such talk to an Irishman is
+more than maddening. Or supposing foreigners were to say to the English,
+to the countrymen of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Sir Joshua Reynolds,
+Gainsborough, and Constable: “Don’t bother about writing poetry or
+painting pictures, stick to your counters and your cotton-mills, you
+people of shopkeepers; leave art to us,” we should resent it. This
+attitude of mind arises from what a French writer calls “_un optimisme
+béat_”—a sort of open-mouthed, weak-chinned satisfaction with oneself
+and all things, which is hopeless and infuriating. And when this
+attitude is blent with a tincture of rancid unction or a dose of gushing
+and indulgent sentimentalism—when, for instance, people condescend to
+patronisingly rave about the ritual of such an institution as the
+Catholic Church it is more intolerable still.
+
+It is for this reason I wish to make myself quite clear on this point.
+If, as I hope, I have escaped the pitfall of giving the impression that
+Russians are interesting as exotic and barbaric specimens, as
+thinly-civilized savages, I none the less wish not to incur the
+suspicion that, in admiring in them the qualities of the heart, I am
+overlooking in them the qualities of the head, or assuming the absence
+of sterner stuff, and of the tougher and more practical virtues. I do
+not wish it to be thought that I am saying to them, “Be good, sweet
+child; let those who will be clever.” It is not necessary to point out
+their cleverness and all it stands for. We all know they are clever. I
+wish to point out that I think they are good as well; and that their
+goodness is more important than their cleverness, because in general
+goodness is a rarer as well as a greater thing than cleverness. This may
+be a truism, but modern life has given to most truisms the appearance of
+startling paradoxes.
+
+Take, on the one hand, the most striking examples among examples of
+energy and practical achievements—of men, deeds, and facts—which the
+Latin and Anglo-Saxon races can show, and Russia need not fear to hold
+her own.
+
+Take any one of the faults which Russian critics hold up as the curse of
+the country, and it is easy to show that though the accusation may be
+true, it is not the whole truth; that the contrary is true also, and the
+exceptions startling. Russians, for instance, often single out laziness
+and the want of practical energy as a national failing. Well and good;
+but the defence of Sevastopol, the creation of the Trans-Siberian
+Railway, and the transport of troops over a single line during war time,
+are examples of abnormal energy in the domain of achievement; and in the
+persons of Peter the Great, Suvorov, and Skobeliev, Russia has given to
+the world examples of terrific and explosive energy. Stern stuff must
+exist somewhere in the Russian character, or else the Russian empire
+would not be there to testify to the fact. The Russian empire is the
+result of something, and it is there.
+
+On the other hand, take those crying faults which Russian critics single
+out and deplore as being the sorest plague-spots and the weakest points
+in the national life and character, and you will find it easy to match
+them in the other countries of Europe and in America. And you will often
+find that what is attributed to the evils of a particular form of
+government is very often really the result of original sin, and common
+to all countries under different forms and names.
+
+But my point is that while, as far as the general category of faults and
+qualities, virtues and vices is concerned, the Russians are on a par
+with other countries, and no worse if no better, they have, _ceteris
+paribus_, a peculiar and unique gift of goodness and faith in the nature
+of their people which is difficult to match in any other country,
+although you will find something like it in America.
+
+That is why I have dwelt less on that stern stuff and those tough and
+stubborn qualities which must be common to all great nations, and whose
+existence naturally and inevitably follows from the very fact of a
+nation being a great nation. Such qualities must be taken for granted.
+Did they not exist, there would be no such thing as the Russian empire.
+
+That is why I disregard them here, and have chosen to dwell more on
+those qualities which I believe to be peculiar to Russia, and which I
+believe to be also a source of greatness. I happen also to think these
+latter qualities to be more important in themselves.
+
+I hope now that I have made it plain that it is on account of a humble
+admiration for these special qualities, which by no means excludes a
+serious recognition and respect for all other general qualities, and not
+on account of any fantastic whim, condescending self-complacency, or
+hypocritical sense of superiority, that with regard to Russia I echo the
+words which R. L. Stevenson once addressed to the deaf ear of a French
+novelist: “_J’ai beau admirer les autres de toute ma force, c’est avec
+vous que je me complais à vivre._”
+
+
+                                THE END.
+
+-----
+
+Footnote 1:
+
+  From this will be seen the difference between a Russian absentee
+  landowner and an English landlord. The English landlord is essentially
+  a partner in the farming, even if he does not farm the land himself,
+  because he will always sink a certain amount of capital in buildings
+  and their upkeep, whereas the Russian absentee landowner invests no
+  capital in anything: he merely receives the rent. In some cases even
+  the land taxes are paid by the tenant.
+
+Footnote 2:
+
+  Besides this hereditary nobility there was what is called personal
+  nobility, which was not hereditary. (This fact is without any great
+  importance; it simply means that when bureaucracy was established in
+  Russia it was necessary to distinguish between higher and lower grades
+  of public servants, and personal nobility simply conferred rights of
+  independence, at a time when only nobles and public servants possessed
+  any such recognized rights.)
+
+Footnote 3:
+
+  It is perhaps as well to note here that the Russian law
+  counterbalances this state of affairs by giving the right to women,
+  even during the lifetime of their husbands, of enjoying and
+  administrating their own property. The Russian woman is not a minor in
+  the eyes of the law as in France.
+
+Footnote 4:
+
+  See page 114.
+
+Footnote 5:
+
+  Contrary to this last provision, the clause was taken advantage of by
+  the Government in 1907 to make a new electoral law which changed the
+  nature of the franchise. This was illegal, and according to the
+  fundamental laws, a _coup d’état_.
+
+Footnote 6:
+
+  The number varies from three to twelve.
+
+Footnote 7:
+
+  Besides the Council of Ministers, there are various other deliberative
+  institutions, such as a Military Council, an Admiralty Council, an
+  Imperial Defence Council, a Financial Committee, and a Court of
+  Chancery.
+
+Footnote 8:
+
+  By a recent law which came into force in January 1914 the _zemskie
+  nachalniki_ are being abolished in certain portions of Russia and
+  replaced by elective Justices of Peace.
+
+Footnote 9:
+
+  The peasants of each Canton elect a candidate, and the elected
+  candidates in their turn elect from amongst themselves the number of
+  members required. The nobility, the merchants, and any peasants who
+  are outside the Commune—that is to say, private landowners—are elected
+  by property qualification; they have to possess so many acres, or so
+  much immovable property, or a commercial or industrial establishment
+  of a certain assessed value. People who own not less than one-tenth of
+  the necessary property qualification, also persons who are less than
+  twenty-five years of age, and women, may take part in the election by
+  proxy.
+
+Footnote 10:
+
+  The Government or Provincial Zemstvo Assembly is composed of a certain
+  number of members, fixed by the law, elected by the District
+  Assemblies:—
+
+   Of all the marshals of the nobility;
+   Of all the presidents of the districts;
+   Of the chairman and members of the government council;
+   Of representatives of the clergy;
+   Of the heads of the local branches of the Department of Agriculture.
+
+Footnote 11:
+
+  Cheerfulness, _not_ gaiety.
+
+Footnote 12:
+
+  _Russkoe Slovo_: “At the Music Hall: G. Bayan,” September 14 (27),
+  1913.
+
+Footnote 13:
+
+  There is also in Lent the Mass of the Presanctified.
+
+Footnote 14:
+
+  It is very improbable that anything of the kind will occur.
+
+Footnote 15:
+
+  These are more or less in a state of decay, and in spite of periodic
+  spurts of activity brought about by various stimuli, such as
+  Government grants, they always lag behind the Zemstvo schools, as they
+  are a nuisance to the clergy themselves, who rarely have time to
+  attend to them.
+
+Footnote 16:
+
+  I quote these figures from the Russian Year Book, compiled by Dr.
+  Howard Kennard, for 1913.
+
+Footnote 17:
+
+  University education is _the_ education in Russia. It has a
+  traditional pretension to be superior to all other (specialized)
+  education, owing to its encyclopædic and philosophical character. The
+  Russian characteristic of knowing something about everything and
+  having vast _aperçus_ is fostered by it. The university is to the
+  Russian student what Paris is to the Frenchman, what Athens was to the
+  ancient world. The student often misses the lectures of his own course
+  and attends the lectures of other faculties, and this is encouraged by
+  the professors, who did the same when they were young. In Russia,
+  erratic and sporadic information is preferred to systematic and narrow
+  knowledge.
+
+Footnote 18:
+
+  According to a new law, which comes into force on January 1, 1914, a
+  higher village court has been created for the consideration of appeals
+  from the Canton Court, consisting of the local justice of peace as
+  chairman, and the presidents of the Canton Courts of the district as
+  members.
+
+Footnote 19:
+
+  Nishni-Novgorod, Kazan, Saratov, Kishniev, and the district (_yiezd_)
+  of St. Petersburg.
+
+Footnote 20:
+
+  This officer is to be abolished by the new law. At present he
+  exercises the same judicial functions as the zemsky nachalnik, with
+  the difference that his jurisdiction is in the town districts, that of
+  the zemsky nachalnik in the country districts.
+
+Footnote 21:
+
+  It has been widely affirmed that there has never been a peasant jury
+  in Kiev before.
+
+Footnote 22:
+
+  The word _knut_ is the ordinary word for whip.
+
+Footnote 23:
+
+  Private attorneys (_chastnye povierenye_) plead before a specific
+  court from which they have received a special licence. They are not
+  required to take a university degree.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+                           BY MAURICE BARING.
+
+
+ WHAT I SAW IN RUSSIA.                                          1s. net.
+
+  “The experiences and impressions of a most accomplished travel-writer,
+  journeying to the battlefield of Liao-yang and back.”
+
+                                                _The Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+  “The volume is made up from three of the author’s earlier books, and
+  contains those sections which he regards as of permanent interest. The
+  reader will find that they give a fascinating account of modern life
+  in Russia as viewed from various standpoints.”
+
+                                                            _The Queen._
+
+                        THOMAS NELSON AND SONS.
+
+        THE MAINSPRINGS OF RUSSIA. _First Published, June 1914._
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
+
+
+ ● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
+ ● Used numbers for footnotes.
+ ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
+ ● The caret (^) serves as a superscript indicator, applicable to
+     individual characters (like 2^d) and even entire phrases (like
+     1^{st}).
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77805 ***