§1
ONE of the saddest consequences of the revolution effected by Peter the Great is the development of the official class in Russia. These chinóvniks are an artificial, ill-educated, and hungry class, incapable of anything except office-work, and ignorant of everything except official papers. They form a kind of lay clergy, officiating in the law-courts and police-offices, and sucking the blood of the nation with thousands of dirty, greedy mouths.
Gógol raised one side of the curtain and showed us the Russian chinóvnik in his true colours;[[97]] but Gógol, without meaning to, makes us resigned by making us laugh, and his immense comic power tends to suppress resentment. Besides, fettered as he was by the censorship, he could barely touch on the sorrowful side of that unclean subterranean region in which the destinies of the ill-starred Russian people are hammered and shaped.
[97]. Gógol’s play, The Revisor, is a satire on the Russian bureaucracy.
There, in those grimy offices which we walk through as fast as we can, men in shabby coats sit and write; first they write a rough draft and then copy it out on stamped paper—and individuals, families, whole villages are injured, terrified, and ruined. The father is banished to a distance, the mother is sent to prison, the son to the Army; it all comes upon them as suddenly as a clap of thunder, and in most cases it is undeserved. The object of it all is money. Pay up! If you don’t, an inquest will be held on the body of some drunkard who has been frozen in the snow. A collection is made for the village authorities; the peasants contribute their last penny. Then there are the police and law-officers—they must live somehow, and one has a wife to maintain and another a family to educate, and they are all model husbands and fathers.
This official class is sovereign in the north-eastern Governments of Russia and in Siberia. It has spread and flourished there without hindrance and without pause; in that remote region where all share in the profits, theft is the order of the day. The Tsar himself is powerless against these entrenchments, buried under snow and constructed out of sticky mud. All measures of the central Government are emasculated before they get there, and all its purposes are distorted: it is deceived and cheated, betrayed and sold, and all the time an appearance of servile fidelity is kept up, and official procedure is punctually observed.
Speranski[[98]] tried to lighten the burdens of the people by introducing into all the offices in Siberia the principle of divided control. But it makes little difference whether the stealing is done by individuals or gangs of robbers. He discharged hundreds of old thieves, and took on hundreds of new ones. The rural police were so terrified at first that they actually paid blackmail to the peasants. But a few years passed, and the officials were making as much money as ever, in spite of the new conditions.
[98]. Michail Speranski (1772-1839), minister under Alexander I, was Governor of Siberia in 1819.
A second eccentric Governor, General Velyaminov, tried again. For two years he struggled hard at Tobolsk to root out the malpractices; and then, conscious of failure, he gave it all up and ceased to attend to business at all.
Others, more prudent than he, never tried the experiment: they made money themselves and let others do the same.
“I shall root out bribery,” said Senyavin, the Governor of Moscow, to a grey-bearded old peasant who had entered a complaint against some crying act of injustice. The old man smiled.
“What are you laughing at?” asked the Governor.
“Well, I was laughing, bátyushka; you must forgive me. I was thinking of one of our people, a great strong fellow, who boasted that he would lift the Great Cannon at Moscow; and he did try, but the cannon would not budge.”
Senyavin used to tell this story himself. He was one of those unpractical bureaucrats who believe that well-turned periods in praise of honesty, and rigorous prosecution of the few thieves who get caught, have power to cure the widespread plague of Russian corruption, that noxious weed that spreads at ease under the protecting boughs of the censorship.
Two things are needed to cope with it—publicity, and an entirely different organisation of the whole machine. The old national system of justice must be re-introduced, with oral procedure and sworn witnesses and all that the central Government detests so heartily.