Thus was the Committee of Ministers helplessly committed to preserve in wealth and power that handful of useless human beings who may be called the Tsardom or the Government or the ruling classes—the same kind of men who for generations past have brought all that long tale of poverty, ignorance, and bloodshed upon the Russian people. Nothing could save them from the fatality of their own choice. They were forced to go on with it now, driven day by day a few steps further along the inevitable road. So day by day they gave their orders to General Diedulin, the new Chief of Police and Durnovo’s assistant at the Interior, and day by day the noblest and most thoughtful men and women of Russia were shot, imprisoned, or dragged away to the oblivion of Siberia.
I know that in England one of the pleasant myths circulated by the Tsar’s hirelings, or sanctimonious patrons, is that Siberian exile has been abolished. It is as untrue as the similar myth about flogging the peasants for taxes. In St. Petersburg on January 26th, I met a lady whose brother, a conspicuous barrister in a large city of Central Russia, had just been exiled to Siberia for five years because he took the chair at a public meeting. Like so many other confiding people, he was fool enough to trust to a Tsar’s Manifesto, and now as a reward for his simple faith, cut off from his friends, his family, and his career, he is moving by stages from prison to prison towards the dreary spot where the best years of life must be spent, even if he ever returns. It would, indeed, be unthrifty of the Government, when they have crammed the Russian prisons to bursting point, not to take advantage of the Siberian system so providentially organized by their predecessors in office.
On the whole horizon of St. Petersburg life only one sign of hope appeared. In the lecture theatre of the Mokhovaya, leading out of the Nevsky, where the educated revolutionists of the middle classes are accustomed to hold their meetings, a quiet body of men used to assemble every afternoon, with a few quiet men and women to listen. They were the Constitutional Democrats, whose meetings Witte had been compelled, not to permit, but to ignore, because in case of refusal they threatened to remove into Finland, and it was not so easy to spy upon them there. Delegates had arrived from all parts of the Empire—Mohammedan Tartars from Kazan, Armenians from the Caucasus, heathen Mongols from the uttermost parts of the East, speaking no human tongue, nor to be understood by any, had not old Professor Clementz been discovered still alive among his specimens of anthropology. Banished in his prime to the extremity of Mongolia in the hope that he might die of savagery and cold, he had dwelt so many years among the heathen that in face and language he could hardly be distinguished from them, and now they found in him their friend, the one man in the city to whom their monosyllabic squeaks and sounds conveyed a human meaning.
So the delegates met, and listened and debated, discussing the tactics to be employed if ever time should overtake the promised Duma, which continually receded. What was the right course for men who hoped nothing from violence and yet would fight for freedom; men who distrusted haste, believed in law, and yet aimed at revolution? Being concerned with subjects so far-reaching, their debates were naturally more abstract than is usual among hardened old Parliamentarians like ourselves, to whom “the middle of next week” expresses an unimaginable and negligible distance of time. But they boasted themselves practical as Russian parties go, and at all events they were not hampered, as our Liberals usually are, by class tradition and social influence. I mean, for instance, they would never endure anything so ludicrous as a House of Lords in their constitution, and if they should ever come to real power, they would enjoy the very unusual advantage of a clear field. But their immediate object was to form a strong block of opposition to the representatives of the six reactionary parties with which the Government designed to flood the Duma when the elections came—such parties as the Octobrists, or nominal supporters of the Manifesto; the party of “Legal Order,” or Law and Order, as we say; and the party of Industry and Commerce.
Beside the platform at their meetings stood a large death-bed portrait of Sergius Troubetskoy, the Rector of Moscow University, who had suddenly died in the previous September while pleading for freedom of speech, as I mentioned in the Introduction. Across the portrait was written the inscription, “The Champion of Freedom,” and the spirit of the great Zemstvoist leader might well be said to direct the methods and purposes of the assembly. Among the living leaders present were Petrunkevitch, who had succeeded to Troubetskoy’s position upon the Moscow Zemstvo; Struve, long the exiled editor of the Russian paper, Emancipation (Osvobojdenie) in Paris; and Miliukoff, so well known in France through David Soskice’s translation of his book on Russian culture, and in England and America through his own Chicago lectures upon Russia and its Crisis. He almost alone among all the Russians I met in St. Petersburg at that time still retained the power of hope and enthusiasm undiminished, in spite of all the disasters of the past seven weeks.
“The reaction,” he said to me, “cannot last very long. The Moscow rising was a great mistake, and at the end of it I too almost despaired. I thought all the educated people and the well-to-do would be permanently set against change. But the Government’s violence has kept them on our side. The “classes” are as much sickened by the slaughter as other people. They have learnt that it is the Government, and not the revolutionists, who are the party of destruction and disorder. Reaction? Why, it is already over. The spirit of the thing is dead.”
Coming at such a time, such words were startling in their confidence. But then Professor Miliukoff is one of those few happy people who have carried with them the glories of youth into middle age, and there is no glory of youth more enviable than the wisdom which, as the Preacher said, is the mother of holy hope.
CHAPTER XIV
THE PRIEST AND THE PEOPLE
The shallows of the Gulf of Finland were frozen hard, and from a distance the sea looked like a huge flat plain covered with snow, while wind and grey storms of drift raged over it, blotting out the horizon. But when, almost imperceptibly, the sledge quitted the flat land for the flat sea, the green ice sometimes lay bare upon the surface, or threw up a sharp green edge, and sometimes the hollow rumble of the runners told of the deeper water beneath. At one place a few planks had been thrown across a gaping crack, where the current or the pressure of ice had split the great field, and a dark line of water stretched away on either hand till it was lost to sight in the storm. The track was marked by the usual Christmas trees stuck in the ice, and by tall signal posts as well. Yet, as the wind and driving snow increased, it was impossible to see from one mark to the next, and the horse felt his way along, like a man moving from lamp-post to lamp-post in a London fog. Sometimes another sledge suddenly appeared out of limbo two or three yards in front. At three points small wooden huts had been erected as shelters for the lost or frozen. Huge lanterns on poles glimmered through the dark flakes. Driven by the rushing wind, wheels with wooden sails tugged at ropes, and out of the obscurity a deep bell sounded, ominous as the bells rung by the waves around our cliffs. For the dangerous tempest was blowing, which, I believe, the natives call the “Vouga.”
On a sudden a shadowy rampart was seen, a bank of storm-twisted trees, a dimly discerned church, and so we came to the island of Kronstadt, famed for its fortress, its mutiny, and its living saint.