Russian Life To-day

by Bp. Herbert Bury

We find it, therefore, as we should expect to do, in Russia; and more general, perhaps, and more acute than at any other previous time, just before the war was declared. This, it may be remembered, is stated to have been one of the reasons why the curt and hurried ultimatum was presented at Petrograd, where it was thought that social troubles and dangers were so serious that it would be impossible for the government even to think of going to war. We have been told,[12] though it was probably not known outside Russia at that time, what a good turn Germany really did to the Russian government and the Russian people by turning their thoughts from their own grave difficulties to the dangers which threatened them from without. At that time, we are assured, not only Petrograd, but every big manufacturing district of Russia, was shaking with revolt of a peculiar kind, and civil war on the point of breaking out. In Petrograd there were barricades already erected, at least 120,000 were on strike, tramcars had been broken up, attacks upon the police had taken place, factories were garrisoned in expectation of attack, the Cossacks were everywhere—openly in the streets, hidden away in places most threatened. The police arrested those who were supposed to be leaders, but it made no difference, for the people needed no leading. They were all so thoroughly in the movement. Indeed, we are told, “things seemed to the Russian government to be as bad as they could very well be; and orders were actually given for the severest possible repressive measures, which would, perhaps, have involved a large-scale battle, probably a massacre, and certainly a state of war in the capital.” It would have been “Red Sunday” over again, only this time infinitely and more ominously worse. A great calamity was narrowly escaped.

Now there is this to be noticed about this Russian upheaval, and this social bitterness and discontent expressing itself in the way with which we are only too sadly familiar, and which claims our attention as being so entirely different from similar movements of our own. The Russian workers made no demands, had no special grievances nor complaints which they wished to make known. In all strikes one has previously heard of there has been some hardship or injustice to bring forward, some claim or request to urge. Here there was nothing of the kind. “They were not on strike,” we are told, “for higher wages. In no single case did the men make a demand from their masters. In no single case had a man gone on strike because of a grievance which his master could put right. No concessions by the masters could have brought the men back to work. The only answer they returned when asked why there was a strike was that they were dissatisfied with their lives, and that they intended to disorganize the State until these things were altered.” It is clear, therefore, that the social unrest, and the activity which has so long resulted from it, have not a very definite aim as yet. Hence the Nihilist. He is dissatisfied, embittered, smarting under a sense of wrong; and while he does not see how he can put things right, feels that he must do something, and so destroys. “That at least will be something,” he feels, “then we can begin again.”

This, we can further see, will be the youthful student’s view if dissatisfied and discontented, and without either experience or constructive and practical knowledge to suggest how the wrong may be put right. Some of us, therefore, think that Russia’s greatest social danger arises from the student part of her population, and that her great problem—a vital one for her to solve, and soon—is how to deal fairly and wisely with them, and, caring for them as paternally as she does for her peasant population, incorporate them fully and intimately into her national life.

It is from the educated classes that social unrest and discontent have proceeded in Russia, and from them that those agents have come who have spread wild and daring dreams of change and revolution amongst the working classes of the towns, and, although that has not been so successful, amongst the peasantry also.

To some extent their socialistic ideas have been echoes from Western Europe. I remember being told, when I first went to Petrograd, “We usually have your bad weather here about eight or ten days after you, only we have it worse.” It would seem that the rule holds good in other ways also, for Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace tells us, in one of his three deeply interesting chapters on social difficulties in Russia, that during the last two centuries all the important intellectual movements in Western Europe have been reflected in Russia, and that these reflections have generally been what may fairly be called exaggerated and distorted reflections of the earlier socialistic movements of the West, but with local peculiarities and local colouring which deserve attention.

He goes on to explain how the educated classes, absorbing these ideas from abroad, just as ideas, and not as relating to the conditions of life in Russia as closely as in England, France, and Germany, from which they came, have quite naturally been less practical in the conclusions they have drawn from them, if indeed they have pushed their ideas to any conclusion at all. We are shown plainly by this lucid and well-informed writer how natural it has been for Western Socialists to be constructive and definite in their aims, while Russians could only be destructive. Nihilism is made clear, and we understand its origin, while we can equally well understand what we are so reassuringly told about its present decline. This does not imply necessarily that Russian thinkers and workers are becoming less socialistic in sympathy and aims, but more practical; and that they are learning, just as the West has taught them, that the only way in which they can hope to advance their own views is to use all the legal means which their government, as it becomes ever more democratic and constitutional, will increasingly give them.

But amongst all the different classes who may be called educated, the university students of both sexes form the class which most claims our sympathies, and constitutes, I consider, Russia’s gravest problem. There are ten universities in the empire, only one of which contains less than 1,300 students, while the leading ones far exceed this number—Moscow having just under 10,000, and Petrograd about 8,500. We can hardly realize what such numbers mean for the national life, when over 40,000 men and women are receiving university education and being prepared for professional careers. Over 15,000 are studying law, nearly 10,000 are receiving a scientific education before taking up work as chemists, engineers, etc., another 10,000 are studying medicine, comparatively few only being left for the teaching profession. There are only about a hundred divinity students.

In addition to these there are Russian students in all the universities of Europe. I have never been able to ascertain their actual numbers, but at Geneva, Lausanne, Berne, Leipzig, Berlin, and other great centres of education I have always been told, not only that they were there in no small numbers, but that they were the keenest and most attentive of all the students in the class, the first to come, and the last to leave, always in the front seats, and unflagging in their attention. They are evidently most eager to learn, and are turned out from all the universities of Europe and from their own, extremely well equipped and prepared for professional work. Then a vast number of students of this class are pitiably poor, straining every nerve, putting up with privations undreamed of elsewhere, in order to get through the preparation for their life’s work.

Many of them, great numbers of them indeed, must be miserably disappointed. Town and city life, upon which the professional classes must rely chiefly in seeking the means of gaining their livelihood, has not developed as yet in proportion to that of the agricultural population; and certainly at nothing like the rate which would be necessary if all those educated and trained at the universities were to be provided with careers and given an adequate opportunity. The supply is far, far greater than the demand.

Thus we have in Russia a large class of really competent, brainy, well qualified young graduates of both sexes, naturally longing to take their part in the life, work, and affairs of their country, urged on also by their poverty to seek and even demand it; and yet many, it seems to me sometimes that it must be far the greater number, must be unable to find it. Here obviously are all the materials for a real social danger; and students, therefore, always appear in stories of plots and conspiracies, always fill an important place in plays of the same kind, and are always to the fore in tumults and demonstrations. It must be so, for they are the one really embittered class, and to them it must seem sometimes that there can be no hope for them at all in the social order as it is, and that its only possibility for them lies in its being destroyed and reconstructed.