V
Let us return to the problem: What is the matter with Russia? What is the cause of its general decay and demoralization? The revolution proved a failure. The masses—the army particularly—were unprepared for carrying out the long cherished ideal. But that was not all. The Russian revolutionary movement has been used to failures and temporary collapses, the organizations have been destroyed and abolished many a time, and yet like a Phœnix they would arise from out the ashes and manifest their significant existence again and again. The cause, to all appearances, lies with the modernized system applied by the bureaucracy in its war with the people—the demoralization of the people. What Nicolas I. could not attain through his iron despotism; what Alexander III. failed to accomplish by means of crudest oppressions and restrictions carried through by such arch-tyrants as Pobyedonostzev, D. Tolstoy, Muravyov, etc.; what had been beyond the reach of Nicolas II. during the dictatorships of his genial assistants of the type of Plehve, the hero of Kishinev, or General Trepov, the man of Bloody Sunday (January, 1905),—this important point was won by the gentleman-butcher, the hangman in the frock-coat, the late premier Stolypin. The credit for having succeeded in breaking the spirit of the nation and for having brought it to the verge of demoralization is largely due to his policy.
To accomplish a coup d’état, to abolish the Douma and reinstall the old order of things, was the easiest attainable measure for Stolypin at the time of his appointment to the highest post in the state. The opposition was silenced by military force, the servile European financiers renewed their enormous credit to the “pacified” Czardom which had been on the brink of bankruptcy, and it seemed an obvious step to declare urbi et orbi the successful restoration of the ancient autocracy. But Mr. Stolypin was a politician of Bismarck’s school. He loathed the laurels of a Pyrrhic victory. The rich experience of his ill-famed predecessors had taught him that the more harshly he suppressed the opposition the deeper it would grow and develop in the “Underground”; that the closer he stopped up the yawning crater the more intense and terrible would be the inevitable explosion. A complete return to the old regime would again unite the entire nation within and the civilized world from without in common hatred for the outworn Asiatic despoty. Instead the shrewd premier chose the old Cæsarean maxim, Divide et impera.
To incite racial hatred among the heterogeneous strata of the one hundred and thirty millions population; to provoke the meanest mob instincts and to flatter the lowest chauvinistic sentiments; to create mutual ill feelings in all ranks of society by various provocative means; to incarnate espionage in the national life as a virtue; to corrupt and prostitute all state institutions, so as to kill every sense of confidence in the mercenary justice and respect for all authorities; to arrest intellectual progress by barring and banishing the best professors, by forbidding enlightenment organizations, by distracting young minds from social problems through unscrupulous patronage of nationalistic societies in the high schools and universities, of “easy amusements” and all but clean sports; to augment crude force to the degree of absolute right and sole law,—these have been the chief strategic measures of the modernized absolutism.
It is true that a similar course, although on a considerably smaller scale, has been pursued by the Russian government all through the nineteenth century. The originality of Stolypin’s methods and of those of his less original successors lies in their up-to-dateness, their quasi-modernism, their pseudo-constitutionalism, their hypocritical jesuitism. Actually Russia represents the same old Asiatic despotism as of olden days. Officially, however, it wears with a clumsy awkwardness the European frock-coat of parliamentarism. It is a modern Janus, with an artificial human expression towards the outside world, and with its natural primitive bestial front at home.
The Douma, the long-cherished ideal of the people, was transformed from a house of representatives into an ante-room of the government, into a shameful profanation of parliamentarism. The first two Doumas gave an overwhelming opposition to the government, and the latter found an easy way to get rid of its disagreeable opponents by dissolving the Assemblies and suing the deputies as rebels. The unscrupulous Senate issued a series of “modifications” to the electoral laws, and thus insured for the later Doumas a “desirable” element. Having deprived the majority of the populace of voting rights, giving all means of assistance and protection to the “Black Hundreds”—criminal societies flourishing under the standard of patriotism, terrifying the average voter and driving him into political absenteeism, the government succeeded in gaining a majority of obsequious manikins who have sold the people for a pottage of lentils and have debased the Douma to a purely instrumental force in the hands of Stolypin & Co.
Even the moderate liberals of the type of Professor Paul Milyoukov or Prince Eugene Troubetzkoy, who have been ardent supporters of the Douma as a means of educating the people on constitutional ideas,—even they are gradually losing their rosy expectations. Representative Maklakov, a man to whom even the late Stolypin, his bitterest antagonist, paid the highest respect, in his report on the Douma cried in despair: “One could have hoped that the Douma was useless. Alas! It is getting harmful.”