V.
Partly from the aggressiveness which is the natural bent of a despotic military monarchy, partly from the wish to check the home-growth of Liberal sentiments by frequent blood-letting abroad, the government of Alexander II. has tried to meet the danger which has been gathering round the autocratic system by lighting up foreign wars. Central Asia has served him for that purpose. So has Turkey. The flag of ambition was flaunted before public opinion as soon as there was a revival of the Opposition tendency in internal affairs.
An attempt at opening up the whole Eastern Question was made as early as 1870, when France and Germany were locked together in deadly embrace. The confidential despatches and cypher telegrams exchanged in 1870 between Mr. de Novikoff, the Russian Ambassador at Vienna, and Mr. Ionin, the Russian Consul-General at Ragusa, which fortunately came to light some years ago, have fully proved that even then Muscovite policy busied itself with getting up a phantom insurrection in Herzegovina, preparatory to an attack upon Turkey. Nor is it a secret that a Bulgarian Committee of Insurrection, affiliated to Russia, had been in existence at Bucharest for years previous to the late war. All these propagandistic intrigues were in a measure designed to occupy some of the more active minds in Russia, who hesitated, between home reform and Panslavistic ambition.
The Czar has indulged in his warlike enterprizes, but he has deceived himself in his calculations as regards home policy. All his frightful spilling of blood abroad has not been able to prevent the formation and extension of what is called the Nihilist Conspiracy. Side by side with his wars, the Secret League has grown apace, overshadowing all his glory. So extensive have the ramifications of that Conspiracy become that the liveliest interest is now awakened as to its origin and its earliest germs.
In the nature of things it is impossible, at present, to speak with full certainty on this subject. The Russian revolutionists, being engaged in a desperate struggle, have neither the leisure necessary for writing such statements; nor is it their interest to go into details. Judicial inquiries have lifted, here and there, some corner of the mysterious winding-sheets in which the secret Vehme is enveloped. But more light can only be expected after the Conspiracy has been entirely crushed,—in which case, however, owing to the heroic silence which its adherents generally maintain, a great deal of knowledge will for ever be buried in the grave,—or the fuller clearing up will come when, as I would fain hope, this fierce struggle ends with a triumph, whether complete or partial, of the cause of freedom.
Even under the iron rule of Nicholas, there were, many years after the St. Petersburg insurrection of 1825, still some faint traces of Secret Societies, in which the spirit of Pestel and Murawieff was continued. One of these occult Leagues was that of Petrascheski, detected in 1849, whose members were sentenced to forced labour and to banishment to Siberia. A nearer approach to the plebeian element than was observable in the Conspiracies of 1817-25, characterized this later association. Altogether the more educated classes gradually began to seek closer contact with the people at large.
This task was in so far facilitated by the tyrannical Czar-Pope Nicholas, in that he not only trod under foot that portion of the nobiliary class which aimed at a Constitutional share of the political power, but also persecuted the various dissenting sects in the most barbarous fashion.
Under an outward gloss of official orthodoxy, Russia is eaten up with a chaos of sects. The Raskolniks, or Old Believers, profess to be the real Church; yet the simplest civic rights were always denied to them. Besides those Old Believers, numerous other sects exist. They in their turn are surrounded by a strange fringe of "Runners," "Jumpers," "Flagellants," "Self-Mutilators," and other eccentric or anti-social pests which crop up most thickly in the dank shadow of an obscurantist despotism, whose very roots, however, they gradually destroy and encroach upon. Persecuted men often seek solace in wild hopes and prophetic beliefs, which, if strongly nurtured by agitation, are apt to imperil the persecutor. Under Nicholas, the persecutor of all Dissenters, popular seers occasionally arose, who in their occult meetings predicted from the book of Esdra that, after the reign of Nicholas should be over, the Monarchy would fall down under his son and that "the people then would be happy and free."
Such a state of feeling in the lower and more backward social strata rendered it at all events easier for would-be reformers of the conspirator type to enter into closer contact with the plebeian element. Though educated men could not have any sympathy with the mystic views and tone, they found a practical ally in the sullen dissatisfaction which drove Dissenters to opposition against the Government. So it was under Nicholas. So it still is under Alexander II. It may suit the sacerdotal Ritualists, who would fain establish a connection of High Church Anglicanism with the official orthodoxy of the East, to promote the aggressive policy of the Czar. But English Dissenters, who prize their freedom from clerical trammels, might remember that Autocracy in Russia represents all that is worst in political as well as in religious fields. Besides upholding the Stuart doctrine with the means of a Gengis Khan and a Tamerlane, it pretends, in Church matters, to a Papal authority, crushing the Bible Christian, the eccentric Mystic, and the religious Rationalist, with an equally heavy hand—and, if need be, as in the case of the Greek Uniates under Alexander II., with the Cossack knout.
In the educated class of Russia, two very different political currents are observable: the one inclining towards Western Liberalism, whilst the other cultivates the Nationalist sentiment under rather antiquated forms. The "Westerners," "Europeans," or "Liberals," are often regarded by the more stolid adherents of Katkoff as men lacking in patriotism. Between these two parties—if we could speak of parties in a country which has no ordered public life—a third group is observable: the Panslavists, many of whom pursue, under a Liberal mask, aims favourable to the aggrandizement of Czardom. Not a few of the Panslavists are in reality mere Government tools. Others, who, like Aksakoff, began as independent workers in the Panslavist cause, finally yielded to Government temptation; but after a while even they were found to be too much imbued with reforming ideas, and consequently were placed under police surveillance.
The great mass of the Russian people has nothing to do with Panslavism; it does not even know what it is. The idea of a Slav brotherhood is foreign to it. It can be made, by much priestly preaching, to take a sort of bigoted interest in alleged co-religionists who are said to be ill-treated by "unbelieving Turks;" but the interest and the understanding do not go beyond that. Such is the distinct statement made lately by one of the best observers, Ivan Turgenieff, the novelist, in a conversation with a German writer. As to the revolutionary party in Russia, it has more and more become estranged from the Panslavistic tendency—so much so that at present it stands in direct opposition to it.
Alexander Herzen,[49] who favoured the Panslavistic cause, could still speak, retrospectively, of Russian Czars as being "Robespierres on horseback"—an expression of so doubtful a value that it rather reminds us of the pseudo-revolutionary language of Napoleonism than of the purer Democratic principles. Herzen's idea being that Constantinople should become the capital of a great Russo-Slav Empire, we can easily understand that he should have represented Muscovite history under such a deceptive garb. Bakunin also was a Panslavist for a time, but of a different type, aiming as he did at a loose Democratic Federation of the various Slav tribes. The impossibility of this federation all those will acknowledge who think it equally chimerical to form a Romanic Federation between nations so dissimilar in origin, history, language, and aspirations, as are the Italians, the French, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the French-speaking section of the Swiss, and the Roumans of Moldo-Wallachia and Hungary. Or would it be less chimerical to try to form a Teutonic Federation among Germans, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders, German-Swiss, Englishmen, North Americans, and the various English colonies?
Nihilism, on its part, has nothing in common with those Panslavist intrigues which mainly cover an Imperialist ambition. Nihilism, as at present known, is, in fact, the very negation of such dangerous ambitious schemes.
The first Nihilist Society, properly speaking, is said to have been founded by Russian students about the year 1859. German works on philosophy and natural science were then much in demand, as forbidden fruit among the aspiring youths of Russia. The books not being allowed to pass the frontier, stray copies were smuggled in, and lithographed translations passed from hand to hand. The Agricultural College of Petrovski, near Moscow, is considered to have been one of the first places where young men became imbued with such advanced ideas. In this neighbourhood the Netchaieff tragedy was enacted. Among literary men, Tchernitcheffski was one of the first who became a "Nihilist." He suffered for it by being banished to Siberia.
The word "Nihilist" is, however, a somewhat misleading one. It was conferred at first as a nickname. Afterwards it was adopted (like the name of the Gueux) in a kind of dare-devil mood; and has covered, ever since, a great many varieties of political and social discontent, as well as of philosophical Radicalism. There are Nihilists who, from the sheer hopelessness engendered by a tyranny lasting a thousand years, have come to cultivate a Philosophy of Despair, of Disgust, and of Destruction, without troubling themselves as to the constitution of the Future. These are men that profess a wish to do away with all State organizations, for the sake of a morbid Individualism. Others there are who, in the semi-revolutionary vein of Comte, incline towards a socialist Collectivism in a rather utopian, not to say hierarchic, form. To them the word "Nihilist" is scarcely applicable.
Strictly speaking, the word "Nihilist" covers, at most, a small group of persons of a brooding and impracticable temper, such as is sometimes created under the darkest tyrannies. It may be doubted whether the majority of those who use the dagger and the revolver without compunction against the vile sbirri of an intolerable despotism would call themselves Nihilists, or even Socialists. The greater number of the members of the secret leagues are believed to hold views not far removed from those which have found a practical expression in some freely constituted countries. The violent means employed are, with many, only the outcome of a feeling of revenge easily to be understood under the circumstances; or else they are regarded as a dire necessity in insurrectionary warfare. True, there have been Russians abroad who spoke of "abolishing the Family and Property." But nothing warrants the assumption that this is the principle of the Nihilists in Russia itself.
If either mere anarchy, or a system of barrack Communism, be the object of the majority of the men and women whose deeds have of late riveted the attention of all Europe, it is hard to comprehend that these conspirators should have secured so many friends among classes which by education and position cannot possibly have any sympathy with mere destructive or utopian schemes. Of the existence of numerous friends of the Nihilists in the higher classes there is, however, no doubt. Thus only can the hold be explained which the occult propaganda of this hic et ubique conspiracy has obtained upon the commonwealth.